Acer announced its first touchscreen Chromebook, an update to the Acer C720 called the C720P, which comes at a price almost as sweet as its non-touchscreen variant, announced a couple of weeks ago.

The C720P comes with a lot of the same features of the super-cheap new C720, including a Haswell-generation Intel Celeron processor and a display with decent resolution, which also happens to be touchscreen-enabled. The move from Acer deserves a lot of attention not only because it's a low-cost touchscreen Chromebook, but because the increased inclusion of touchscreen features may signal the first steps towards a broader tablet hybridization of Google's Chrome OS laptops. 

Hardware Specs

First, let's look at the technical capabilities of the new Acer Chrome OS C720P. The touchscreen display is an 11.6-inch ComfyView HD display with a decent top resolution (especially considering the price) of 1366 x 768p. The touchscreen is a multi-touch capable display that registers gestures like swipe, tap, and pinch to zoom, which, of course, is a major feature of tablets.

It's still a laptop, so you'll get a full laptop keyboard and touchpad for navigation as well. Inside the guts of the machine is an Intel Celeron 2955U processor from the Haswell generation, so it improves battery life without Acer needing to beef up the powerpack. That said, Acer's C720P only gets about 7.5 hours of mixed use, which is reasonable, but not high-end. However, at only 2.98 pounds and a folded depth of 0.78-inches, the Acer C720P makes up for shorter battery life with portability.

Also price: the Acer C720P costs only $299.

For that, you'll also get a 32GB SSD storage drive that boots up in less than 7 seconds, according to Acer's release, and because it's a Chromebook, a lot of the storage you'll need will automatically happen in the cloud, with 100GB of Google Drive included. Assisting the Haswell Celeron processor is 2GB of DDR3 memory, and the C720P comes with a USB 3.0 Port, USB 2.0 port, WiFi, and HDMI port built in. There's also an HD webcam for video chatting or selfies.

Possibilities Abound, But Mostly For Future Devices

Google and Acer are pushing touchscreen Chromebooks, but the C720P is the first device running Chrome OS that is built and priced to sell like a Chromebook. Earlier this year, Google itself built and unveiled the Chromebook Pixel, the first Chromebook with a touchscreen. It featured a super high definition 12.85-inch 2560 x 1700p touchscreen packing a total of 4.3 million pixels, along with lots of other interesting and impressive design features.

However, the Chromebook Pixel costs, at minimum, $1,299.00 and gets a paltry estimated 5 hours of use due to its hardware and amped up display - making it more of a curiosity for the Chromebook-obsessed with a sizeable disposable income than the cheap, lean Chrome OS machines that Google's Chrome OS philosophy fosters.

But with the Acer C720P, we get the first no nonsense touchscreen Chromebook priced to sell like a Chromebook. While it may not be as inexpensive as the new non-touchscreen Acer C720, which at about $200 is practically a stocking stuffer, the $300 Acer C720P is cheaper than even it's lowest-priced rivals, like Windows 8-running Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 2 or Surface 2. And at $300, it's less than a third of the price of a MacBook Air, which still doesn't feature a touchscreen.

However, the Acer C720P is just the first step towards Chrome OS competing in the increasingly fused market of large tablets and small, touchscreen laptops. For one, the Acer C720P is definitely not a hybrid. It rigidly sticks to the laptop form-factor, for good or ill: the touchscreen doesn't fold back, twist around or separate in the way.

Making Chrome OS competitive in the hybrid laptop market, which may be PC manufacturers' future, won't be too difficult. Chrome OS already feels like an operating system built of a mix of Android UI and the Chrome browser, which basically it is, which means touchscreen gestures are second nature for many applications.

But Chromebooks, the hardware side, will require more than just a touchscreen. They need a way to make these low-cost, lean, mean Chrome OS machines feel more like a tablet, whenever you want, but also retain its laptop capabilities. It needs a touchscreen that can flip, fold, twist, or otherwise become tablet-like before that happens. But Acer's C720P is a good start.