While it doesn’t sport the 144Hz refresh rate of the Asus, in reality, you can’t really tell the difference. Samsung and HP Chromebooks may have sharper, albeit smaller QHD+ displays, but let’s not forget: The price and display size of the Acer is hard to beat in the Chromebook world. There’s plenty of visual real estate for gaming and media consumption with an expansive 16-inch WQXGA 2560 x 1600 (16:10) display, making it a joy to use, whether you’re gaming for hours on end, staring at spreadsheets, or consuming media. The camera is flanked on both sides by speakers, which provides good quality sound, but bear in mind that there’s no noise canceling to keep vacuum cleaners, background chatter, or crying babies at bay. In other words, the camera is best saved as a backup to your primary webcam. The single front-facing 1080p one of the 516 GE struggles with contrast and detail in the daytime and graininess in low light conditions. Why manufacturers don’t optimize their web-cam sensors will continue to remain a mystery. It usually took about 45 seconds to a minute before it resolved itself, but it was pretty distracting. The sensitivity would be way off, it wouldn’t register finger swipes 80% of the time, and tap gestures stopped working. One idiosyncrasy that popped up with the trackpad was that, whenever Xbox Cloud Gaming Beta crashes (which happens one or two out of ten times), the trackpad behaved really strangely. And speaking of resistance, apparently, the keys and all touch surfaces are anti-microbially treated to reduce the growth rate of stain or odor-causing bacteria. The OceanGlass moisture-resistant trackpad is responsive enough with very little drag. At the very least, a larger function (customizable) row would be more becoming of a gaming laptop. Aaron LeongĪnother improvement I’d like to see is customizable gaming keys, especially considering how much unused surface real estate there is on the Acer Chromebook 516 GE. Besides the usual ChromeOS backlight brightness control, Google has now added the ability to alter the color of the backlight to match the wallpaper (harking to Android’s Material You) or a few other color options. It’s fine in the dark, but you’ll be strained to see it in the daytime. One area that was disappointing, especially for a device with gaming aspirations, is the brightness of the RGB backlighting - or rather, the lack thereof. I would have preferred slightly less sponginess and maybe more audible keypresses, but ultimately not bad for a first-time effort. I typed most of this review on this review unit, and while it’s not a mechanical keyboard, it has enough rebound, response time, and feedback for churning out your essays or future novel between hectic gaming sessions. One minor thing is that, with all the space on the sides of the Chromebook, it would have been nice to have a second USB-A port for when the only one is taken up for a mouse dongle. All the I/Os are situated on the left and right sides of the machine. 5G Gigabit Ethernet (2.5GbE) LAN, Bluetooth 5.2, Wi-Fi 6E, one 3.5mm audio port, and one Kensington lock. There are two pass-through USB-C, one USB-A, one full-sized HDMI, an RJ-45 2. Port selection is pretty solid for its kind.
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