Skip to main content

Acer R11 Chromebook

I've been tempted to buy light portable touch Chromebook for myself for a while now. I initially considered the Asus Flip which has a nice design, but relatively slow processor and small screen. Instead I bought the Acer R11 Chromebook as its get a faster Intel processor, 11.6" IPS screen and currently can be had for £179.99 compared to the £200+ of the Asus.

Now I have a 2013 Pixel which is a great device but it has a few shortcomings. Firstly, the battery life is only a few hours and secondly it's quite heavy and a bit big to lug around. The other issue I have is that I use Realtime Board and Explain Everything quite a lot and while they work fine on the Pixel - the positioning of the screen is not ideal for writing on. The Flip feature of the R11 allows you to work at what ever screen angle you want.

The good points of the R11:

  • Seems pretty robust - despite being a plastic case.
  • Keyboard is OK as is the trackpad.
  • IPS screen is far better than most Chromebooks.
  • Touch screen is responsive and works well with touch apps. Handwriting in Google Docs works well.
  • Currently it tells me I have over 7 hours of battery life.
  • Good 720p webcam.
  • Price - bargain for what you get. 

Less good

  • Its not as fast as the Pixel - but does not feel that much slower to use. Intel seem to have done a good job getting performance out of their latest low energy devices. This model has a 1.6Ghz N3050. Octane score is a little over 8000.
  • In tablet mode it's a little heavy for a one handed hold.

Some picts



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Delete a specific email using GAM

If a user send an inappropriate email to a loads of people or get stung by some sort of email exploit you can quickly delete the email from all of the recipients using a GAM command. Step 1 - get the email header Go into Google Vault and search for the offending user or someone known to have got the message. Click show details and grab the email ID. This will be a long string of characters followed by @mail.gmail.com Step 2 - find out who has the email Go into Google Vault and find the original message sent by the offending user. Look at the details to see who got it. Copy the list and dump it into a spreadsheet. Clean up to just a list of emails with a column header 'mail'. Save as a csv file. Step 3 - delete messages with GAM Put your CSV file in your GAM folder - this e.g. assumes its called mail.csv Run: gam csv mail.csv gam user ~mail delete messages query rfc822msgid: MESSAGEIDHERE doit The alternative nuke option is: gam all users delete messages query rf...
Post a Comment
Read more

My favorite GAM commands - well a few of them at least!

Where would be without GAM? Paying for expensive syncing tools or doing tedious manual tasks in the admin console. GAM can automate most things you might want to do in G Suite. So these are a few of my favourite commands - one I use either as part of a batch file - or just standalone. There are loads more - but these are ones that are used daily. Classroom Create a spreadsheet of all your domains classes -  gam print courses todrive Create a spreadsheet of a teacher's classes:  gam print courses teacher fred@mydomain.com todrive Bulk create classes: gam csv classes.csv gam create course alias ~alias name ~alias section ~subject teacher ~teacher status ACTIVE where classes.csv is a list of classes you want to make. Add teachers: gam csv teachers.csv gam course ~alias add teacher ~teacher Add students: gam csv students.csv gam course ~alias add teacher ~student Sync Students (in this example to a group - but could be an ou/csv file) gam csv grou...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to beat ChromeOS EOL and carry on getting updates

ChromeOS devices are great in loads of ways, but they have built-in obsolescence. Google will stop providing updates at a predetermined time according to the schedule you can find here . So the best you will achieve is 6.5 year if you buy the device on the launch day . In reality, it will be generally much less. It's something to watch as a good deal might not be such a good deal if the device only has two years left. Once a device reaches its "due" date, you get a red pop up telling you its time to update every time you log in. The update section tells you there are no more updates. Now the device will work fine - for a while. You might get another 6 months use out of it before core services like Gmail stop working. However, if you are prepared to do a little work, you can install the OS of your choice onto the device and carry on using the device and not accept this. If you want ChromeOS, then you can install Cloudready from Neverware. I'll outline the basic steps...
11 comments
Read more