Acer Unveils New Chromebook, Iconia Tablets Ahead Of CES

Acer announced Friday several new products for the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show as it looks to put a turbulent 2013 behind it.

The computer maker expanded its C720P Chromebook family with a new model, dubbed the Acer C720P-2600, which comes in a new "moonstone white" color. The new Chromebook comes with an 11.6-inch touchscreen high-definition display and, like other C720P models, runs on a Haswell-based Intel Celeron 2955U 1.4GHz processor plus 2 GB of RAM and a 32-GB solid-state drive.

Acer lately has emphasized Chromebooks and targeted the education market, but the model has yet to take off in the enterprise. One longtime Acer partner, who wished to remain anonymous, said he hasn't seen any interest in Chromebooks from his corporate client base.

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"I think maybe in six to nine months companies might start looking at Chromebooks because they're cheap and they're easy to use, and BYOD [bring your own device] is taking off," the partner said. "But if that's where Acer wants to go, then they need to do a better job working at communicating that to us and working with partners."

In addition to bolstering its Chromebook business, Acer also introduced two new Android tablets for its Iconia family. First up is the Acer Iconia A1-830, a 7.9-inch Android tablet featuring Intel's Clover Trail+ Atom Z2560 1.6GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM and 16 GB of internal storage. It also comes with a microSD card slot that supports an additional 32 GB of storage.

The Iconia A1-830 features an aluminum rear cover plus a display resolution of 1,024 x 768. The tablet will be available this quarter starting at $179.99.

Acer also unveiled the smaller and more affordable Iconia B1-720 tablet. The B1-720 features more memory (1 GB) and storage (16 GB) than Acer's previous 7-inch consumer tablet. The new 7-inch tablet runs on a 1.3GHz dual-core MediaTek MT8111 processor and also comes with 32 GB of expandable storage via a microSD card slot.

The Iconia B1-720 will also launch this quarter starting at $129.99.

PUBLISHED JAN. 3, 2014