Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My first Chromebook was my Acer C720P back in early 2014. It was an excellent machine for the money and it also got me spoiled with its touch screen. I was looking to upgrade and decided to go with the Acer R13. I was had become partial to Acer and also wanted another Chromebook with a touch screen. I was incredibly disappointed in the performance of the R13. It was slow to render web pages and the scrolling wasn't smooth at all. It felt slower than my almost 3 year old C720P. I ran Octane 2.0 benchmark and it confirmed my suspicions. The new R13 scored just under 10,000. My old C720P scored 13,000. I couldn't stand the noticeable drop in performance, so I returned it after less than a week. This made me realize that ARM processors are not ready for desktop-class browsing. I saw this C302 was announced at CES and was immediately drawn to it since it has the Intel Core m3 processor. I ordered it as soon as it was available online. Let me tell you, this thing is SNAPPY. Everything you do happens quickly. Web pages render quickly and scroll very smoothly. It's night and day when compared to the R13. It's Octane score is just under 23,000. Huge difference. Even though it has a larger screen than my old C720P, it doesn't feel more difficult to handle. It's actually thinner than the C720P and seems to be lighter as well. The build quality is nice and the hinge is sturdy. You'd never think it was a 360-degree hinge if you didn't flip it all the way around. The keyboard also feels nice and the backlighting is great. I use my Chromebook a lot in the dark and it's a real treat. I'll never have another Chromebook without this feature. Android Apps are available if you switch over the the Beta channel in settings. I got several random reboots when I first ran Android apps on the beta channel. I've decided to power wash and run the beta channel without Android apps enabled for awhile. Hopefully it was a fluke and maybe I'll give them a try a bit later. Android apps should make their way to stable channel in a few months. UPDATE 1/14/17: I re-enabled the Play Store in the beta channel and the Chromebook has been flawless. Apps like Microsoft Word, Excel, etc run wonderfully. The Android Calendar app also works so much better than the Chrome calendar. I learned that it's important to pick your battles and decide which Android apps can truly work better than their Chrome counterparts. For instance, the Android YouTube app doesn't work well at all because it's very inconvenient to get videos into full-screen mode. Another example is the Android Google Maps app. It runs very well, but isn't nearly as full-featured as the Chrome version of Maps. Android Hangouts also doesn't work as well as the Chrome Hangouts App. UPDATE 2/21/17: The Google Play Store became standard in the Stable channel a few weeks ago. Now you can enjoy Android apps straight out of the box without switching channels. I do still keep mine in Beta channel because I enjoy receiving updates a bit early and the Chromebook remains reliable with no bugs that I can observe. UPDATE 8/19/17: Just wanted to mention that this Chromebook DOES support downloading the full Microsoft Office apps from the Play Store. I currently have Word, Powerpoint, and Excel installed. I'm not going to bore you with specs because anyone who shops online can compare specs. What I'll say is that there is only one other Chromebook providing this level of performance at this price range. It's the Samsung Chromebook Pro (not the Chromebook Plus, which has an ARM processor like the Acer R13). While the Chromebook Pro does have a nice high-resolution 3:2 screen and the S-Pen (which is truly a gimmick anyway), it has half the storage, shorter battery life, and no backlit keyboard. It's also $50 more expensive than this Asus. In my opinion, this is the one to beat. This is among the best.