My previous Chromebook was only about three years old and doing fine, but I was worried about tariffs increasing prices. So, I looked for an upgrade. I had not heard of a Chromebook “Plus”, but the specs bore out what that meant when I noticed this device: 8 GB of RAM (twice what my previous device had) and a whopping 512 GB of storage (EIGHT times what my previous device was sporting).The new unit was only 14 inches on the display compared to 15 on the prior model (both Acers), but the specs looked good and it was still a touchscreen. I had not actually looked at the price, so was impressed when I saw it was only $70 more than my existing device had cost in 2022, and still under $300.When this new unit arrived I was immediately impressed by the speed, especially the fact that it detected the 6G network protocol on our recently purchased home router — the first device to even be able to see it. But see the 6G it did, and network/internet access was very speedy. The greatest thing about Chromebooks (everything mirroring exactly what I already had) happened once again on this, my fourth Chromebook. It happened very quickly, in fact, and while it is early days still, everything seems faster. Notably, two things for which I use the device most:First, I play a standard HTML5-developed tactical game that made my older Chromebook lag and lock up once in a while as pages loaded (or didn’t). Especially when playing more intense areas for just 20-30 minutes, the old unit would get slower and slower until I had to close the game and restart it. When I left the game idle and returned, it would take 5-10 seconds for the animations on screen to come back to life. This is not the case with this new Acer. The game loads and runs quickly, and coming back hours later still shows animations moving around.Second, I have Linux installed and added Visual Studio Code to my older Chromebook. VS Code runs on the older unit, but barely. After updates, sometimes it would lock up completely such that only a reboot of the Chromebook brought processes back into line. The new machine installed VS Code quickly and the application starts up fast. Updates to the application and extensions do not stutter or lag. Again, early days on this, but it looks like the title of my review is true: this is the first Chromebook I have had where I think it could do more than light browsing and email and act as a full laptop replacement. I logged into Microsoft 365 and it appears to be fully operational and snappy on performance, so this appears to handle intense web browsing, a development environment, and Microsoft Office without missing a beat.Technical details: The performance of the new machine compared to the previous unit is not altogether surprising. It has 8 GB of RAM, far more ample storage, and runs a full i3 chip instead of Celeron. I went ahead and got geeky with benchmarking in GeekBench, and the old unit (slower processor and fewer cores) scored a 358 on single-core CPU and 610 on multi-core operations. This new Chromebook scored a 1159 on single and 4258 on multi. That’s a significant step up, and the reason the device feels so snappy.The speakers are nice and sound good. They can get pretty loud if you want them to, but on something like this you’d probably use the headphone jack or Bluetooth anyway. USB-to-HDMI works, but I was unable to get 5.1 sound through my A/V receiver even though the device supposedly support DTS. When I listened to something in 5.1 sound from the Chromebook’s own speakers, it did feel like sounds were…around, the way such DTS schemes try to mimic surround, but this machine should not be expected to be perfect on that nor on signal outputs (though I do wonder why they even bother to add the “DTS” badge?).One final touch: mine came with a carrying case, and I don’t recall that being mentioned in the description. It’s nothing extravagant, but most “free” cases I have received in the past have been glorified pieces of packaging material with a zipper glued on. This is a nice case, well-padded, and even has a side pouch suitable for a couple adapters and an HDMI cord, along with any manuals or warranty cards you might want to keep with you. The side pouch is not going to do well at holding a mouse or compact keyboard, but hey — it was free.Overall I am quite pleased that a Chromebook that has very meaningful upgrades to it and still comes in at under $300. This time the upgrades bring the device into near-laptop territory, even if you like to have a lot of browser tabs open or want to do some development and Office work. And one more shout-out for the MASSIVE amount of storage. If you add a 512GB microSD card (only $40-$50) you’ll be up to a TERABYTE of total storage — I consider that nothing short of phenomenal.

This laptop is a great value. It is solidly made with great picture quality, lots of memory and super fast processing. We really like the upward facing stereo speakers.

I have just started to use the laptop but I am very pleased with it it meets the needs that I have for a smaller one compact one as I checked my mail frequently. The screen has good quality with a long-lasting battery.