It's a refreshing design decision to wrap this laptop in a rubberised shock-resistant plastic. The Acer Chromebook 311 is a cheap laptop that may lack processing power but its 1990s design notes and solid build make it a great option for school or taking on your travels. This is a good, cheap laptop for school and college. In its favour the Acer Chromebook 314 has a great battery life (our review found it easily hit the boasted 12.5 hours) and has a good keyboard and its use of Google docs and cloud-based storage ensures it starts and save in seconds.
However, it's not touchscreen, which will affect anyone looking for a cheap digital art tablet or even its compatibility with many Android apps.
The 1080p screen is good, giving you plenty of workspace for your homework. In our Acer Chromebook 314 review, during Mozilla's Kraken benchmarking, we found this was laptop scored 2349.8ms, while the older Google Pixelbook scored 1378.9ms (the lower the score the better in this test of browser speed). When it comes to performance, it's fine for most standard schoolwork, but with a 1.1GHz Celeron CPU and 4GB of RAM, it'll start lagging if you want to do too much with this thing. It's affordable, has a great battery life for lasting throughout an entire school day, and its build quality means students can lug it around without too much concern for its wellbeing. If you're after the best Chromebook for students, then the Acer Chromebook 314 is a fantastic choice.
However, for the price, this is a great value Chromebook. The compact size does mean that some people may find it uncomfortable to use for long periods of time, however, and the screen isn't as bright or vibrant as other Chromebooks out there. Battery life is also very good, which means it's a great choice for people who want to work for long periods of time away from a desk or power source. This gives it a flexibility that other Chromebooks lack, and now that you can run Android apps in Chrome OS, it means this could actually save you from buying two separate devices.īuild quality is excellent, so you can happily chuck this in a bag and carry it around with you without worrying about breaking it, and it's small enough that you'll hardly notice it's there. The Acer Chromebook Spin 311 is a great all-round Chromebook, offering fantastic value for money, good build quality and a handy 2-in-1 design that lets you use it as both a traditional laptop, as well as a tablet-like device.