The Acer Aspire One Cloudbook (14-inch),from $229.99

Chromebooks are low-priced machines made to run Google's cloud-based Chrome OS, but what's a Cloudbook? A Cloudbook is Acer's idea of an inexpensive everyday computer that's also designed to live in the cloud, but runs Windows 10 instead of Chrome OS. In other words, the netbook trend has come around again. The 14-inch Acer Aspire One Cloudbook starts at just $199 ($249 as reviewed) and comes with an Intel Celeron CPU, 2GB of RAM, 64GB of storage and a free 1TB of cloud storage on OneDrive for a year. But when you dive beneath those pedestrian specs, the Cloudbook hides the endurance of a marathon runner. With this combination of price and battery, is the Cloudbook a Chromebook killer?

Design

Constructed out of nondescript dark-gray plastic, the Acer Cloudbook is the Eeyore of notebooks: dreary but reliable. The top and bottom feature a dimpled texture, and while it's not very exciting to touch, the construction felt relatively sturdy.
Inside, the Cloudbook switches to a matte-black bezel surrounding the screen, with a return to dark gray (this time with a matte finish) on its deck. There's not a lot of flair to the Cloudbook, but really, since the price starts at $199, I don't mind.
The 14-inch Cloudbook measures 13.4 x 9.2 x 0.34-0.7 inches and weighs 3.53 pounds, which is a little heavier than the 14-inch Lenovo IdeaPad 100 (13.4 x 9.3 x 0.8 inches and 3.2 pounds), but otherwise quite similar in size. Toshiba's 13-inch Chromebook 2 is expectedly smaller and lighter, at 8.4 x 12.6 x 0.76 inches and 2.97 pounds, although the 2014 HP Stream 13 is quite comparable, at 13.1 x 9 x 0.77 and 3.4 pounds.

Keyboard and Touchpad

Oftentimes, the typing experience can suffer on budget machine. But with the Cloudbook's standard 1.57mm of key travel and 60-gram actuation weight, I felt right at home the instant I put my fingers to the keys. On my first run-through on the 10fastfingers typing test, I hit 78 words per minute, which is right on a par with my typical average. I also really like the Cloudbook's full-sized arrow keys, which have become a rarity on most modern laptops.
The 4.25 x 2.25-inch touchpad offered a similarly satisfactory experience, with quick responses to both multifinger gestures and general mouse movement. The only quirk I noticed was that every time I opened the lid, the system displayed a momentary warning saying that touchpad was disabled. However, this didn't seem to cause a delay in actually getting a reaction.

Display 

If the Cloudbook had a more colorful display, it would have a leg up on even the best Chromebooks. When I viewed movies and photos, colors looked muted and a little lifeless on the notebook's 14-inch, 1366 x 768 display. This was most evident when I watched the Transformers: Devastation trailer; despite the neon sparks of the robot's attacks, action didn't pop like it did on other displays.
The Cloudbook registered 244 nits of brightness, which was dimmer than both the Toshiba Chromebook 2 (378 nits) and the Lenovo IdeaPad 100 (260 nits), but brighter than the truly dim HP Stream 13 from 2014 (166 nits).
Color accuracy wasn't great, as the Cloudbook earned a Delta-E rating of 3.78 (numbers closer to zero are better). This put it well behind the Chromebook 2, which scored 0.9.
The Cloudbook's biggest failing was its color range, which covered just 53.4 percent of the sRGB spectrum. That's significantly lower than the scores of the Chromebook 2 (110 percent) and the HP Stream 13 (79 percent).

Audio

Sound quality on the Acer Cloudbook is its weakest trait. The notebook's audio range is focused almost entirely in the upper mids. Highs were generally tinny, and the lows had almost no impact. When I listened to Stan Bush's "You've Got the Touch," the cymbals sounded like they were made out of aluminum foil, while the snares and bass sounded shallow and far away.

Heat

On the Laptop Mag Heat Test (15 minutes of streaming HD video from Hulu), the top of the Acer Cloudbook stayed cool, measuring 80.5 degrees Fahrenheit on the touchpad and 83 degrees between the G and H keys. Unfortunately, things were less comfortable on the bottom of the laptop, where the Cloudbook surpassed our 95-degree comfort threshold, with a reading of 97 degrees. That's hardly a deal breaker, though.

Ports and Webcam

With an HDMI port, SD card reader, combo headphone/mic jack and just two USB ports (one USB 3.0, one USB 2.0), Acer's Cloudbook is one port short of what you typically get on a 14-inch system.
As for the webcam, the low-res 640 x 360 shooter above the display captured images that were both soft and grainy.

This can be seen in a selfie I took in our well-lit office, which came out dark, noisy and without a lot of detail -- especially in my hair and shirt.

Performance and Graphics

With a 1.6-GHz Intel Celeron N3050 CPU, 2GB of RAM and just 64GB of storage, the Cloudbook was never going to be a processing powerhouse. However, if you need it just to browse the Web, check emails, or fiddle around in a spreadsheet or two, Acer's Cloudbook is totally capable. When I had 10 more or tabs open in Chrome or Edge (Microsoft's replacement for Internet Explorer), some lag started to appear, such as waiting slightly for text to appear when typing in a search bar.

Source From: http://www.laptopmag.com