Acer Delivers New Chromebook and an Android-based All-in-One

Acer, which is rapidly gaining popularity as a portable computing hardware manufacturer, is placing some heavy bets on open source operating systems. The company now has a whopping nine computers based on Google's Chrome OS, including an update to its popular C7 Chromebook. Acer's latest Chromebook, the C720P-2600 (shown), has an 11.6-inch touchscreen and features Intel's dual-core Celeron 2955U chip based on the cutting-edge Haswell architecture. At $299.99, the system will be available in January, and will be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Meanwhile, Acer is already shipping its new TA272 HUL all-in-one PC (seen at left), which runs Android.  The TA272 has a WQHD display with a 2560 x 1440 resolution that is four times sharper than HD, and a touchscreen. It's fully Windows 8 certified and runs Android OS 4.2 Jellybean, so you can run countless Android apps on it. It sells for $1,099.

Acer was out with one of the earlier Chromebooks and has been steadily diversifying its hardware offerings beyond just Windows devices and embracing open source operating systems. As for Android-based PCs, it looks like we'll be seeing many more of these. There are many reports emerging about a new class of hardware products that will arrive at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES) called PC Plus devices. Purportedly, these are going to run both Windows 8 and Android. PC Plus machines won't require any configuration from users, and will reportedly switch instantly between Windows 8.1 and Android.

It's good to see open source operating systems finding their way onto mainstream machines from well-known hardware players. We'll see how far this trend is taken as CES unfolds this month.