Review: Acer's C710-2457 Chromebook is a basic, bargain browsing machine

Acer C710-2457 Chromebook $230.00 The Acer C710-2457 is a bargain among Chromebooks, but there's little else about it that makes it worth buying—or that will convince a smartphone or tablet user to convert.

The main reason I’m reviewing the Acer C710-2457 Chromebook is because it’s cheap. It costs $230 from Acer’s Web site, and a close cousin of this model that's available only at Walmart costs a mere $199.

Unfortunately, bargain pricing continues to be the main reason to consider a Chromebook. Vendors want to tempt Web-centric consumers away from their tablets and smartphones with the promise of a decent-size screen and a bona fide keyboard. Most of the current Chromebooks are so basic, however, that they’re can't offer the better experience that would help their case.

The Acer C710-2457 Chromebook is yet another example. All it provides is a bargain browsing machine that could knock around the family room or a kid’s backpack without causing parental trauma.

The unit is made entirely of hard plastics, with a thick, shiny black bezel around the display and a lightly textured keyboard and touchpad. It feels pretty sturdy, with just a touch of flex in its keyboard and display panels.

It measures 11.2 inches wide by 8.0 inches deep and 1.1 inches thick, and it weighs 3.04 pounds. It uses a 1.1GHz Intel Celeron 847 dual-core processor with 4GB of DDR3 memory and a 16GB solid-state drive. You get ethernet and IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, a trio of USB 2.0 ports, and an SD/MMC port for media cards. Acer says the 4-cell, 2500mAh Li-ion battery lasts 3.5 hours, but it ran for just 3 hours in our tests.

The 11.6-inch TFT LCD display has native resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. It looks nice when you view it straight on, but the image degrades if you tilt it much in any direction. Brightness is decent (200 nits, per Acer's spec), and color was nice—I actually liked the healthy pink of its flesh tones. VGA and HDMI ports are available for display output.

Videos played pretty well on the Acer Chromebook, but the sound from the dual speakers was awful: very tinny, with no bass and little volume range. Plugging in headphones improves the experience.

The full-size keyboard is adequate. Travel is short, and the island-style buttons are a little small, but the keys are widely spaced so you don’t feel cramped. The large, clickable touchpad supports two-finger scrolling.

The hard feel of the plastic keys is one of the main reasons this machine feels cheap, but the key arrangement also has its drawbacks. The top row of function keys are half-size. The page-up, page-down, and cursor keys are even smaller and are squished into the lower right corner. The right- and lefthand Chrome Search buttons (with magnifying-glass icons) on either side of the spacebar will likely be hit by mistake when one tries to press the , , or keys on the same line.

There’s nothing wrong with the Acer C710-2457 Chromebook, other than its being as unremarkable as nearly every other Chromebook now available. Low prices don’t seem to be the answer, given that HP’s Pavilion Chromebook, which sports a 14-inch display, is a strong seller even though it costs about $100 more. Maybe if a few more vendors stuck their necks out to improve the user experience, they’d find more willing buyers.

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Review: Nextly brings together the best of RSS, social networks, and Web browsing

Nextly Nextly is a refreshing way to browse your favorite feeds and social networks.

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Google Reader is dead. It changed forever the way we read our news, and it's gone for good, leaving the arena open for other players to attempt the same feats. Nextly, an innovative reading app based on streams, takes regular RSS feeds, strips them of everything that's annoying about the format, and provides a new reading experience that combines RSS with regular website browsing and social-network surfing.

Nextly turns any webpage or feed into a stream you can easily browse through.

To personalize the experience further, sign into Nextly using Facebook or Twitter. This will give you access to the My Collection and Favorites features, but will also enable Nextly's social Web browsing. Let's say you connected Nextly with your Twitter account; you can now use Nextly's stream to browse your Twitter feed and lists, automatically accessing all tweeted links as full articles. In other words, your Twitter (or Facebook) feed will be miraculously transformed into an easy-to-browse stream, complete with reply, retweet, and other sharing options.

This is all great, you might be thinking, but browsing single feeds doesn't sound too exciting in a post-Google-Reader, Feedly-inspired world. This is where Favorites come in. Once signed in, you can add any stream (or website) to your favorites, which then acts as a regular RSS reader for all intents and purposes.

Bookmark any webpage to your collection, or share it using a unique link.

All your favorite websites are listed under the Favorites tab, and while you can't sort these into folders like you can in other readers, Nextly makes up for it with full articles—no "read more" links—and a built-in social browser. Although Nextly displays full webpages in its streams, these are all pre-loaded, so you never have to wait for them to load while you browse.

Nextly also includes a built bookmarking feature called My Collection, to which you can add articles, tag them, and put them aside for later reading. You can also use the My Collection feature to save important articles for quick reference, and browse it at any time just like any other Nextly stream.

With Nextly, your Twitter feed turns into an RSS feed, with full webpages for each link.

Nextly is still in beta, but you won't notice this most of the time. The only bug I encountered, and this too was rare, was Web elements that failed to load correctly, mostly special ones like an iOS 7 live demo I was trying to check out. There's also no way that I could find to add streams manually if you can't find them in the Explore tab or by using the nextly.com/websitename method. While I was able to browse the vast majority of websites I tried using one of these two methods, I could not browse the ones I failed to find. With that said, if you're tired of truncated RSS feeds and traditional RSS readers, Nextly is sure to brighten your day.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can use this Web-based software.

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