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This morning, at the bright and early time of 4am, I fired up the Chromebook to live-stream Acer’s pre-IFA Berlin 2016 press event. It was crazy-early, but I had high hopes that Acer’s newest unofficial Chromebook would make an appearance. After waiting through IoT devices, Windows laptops, gaming laptops, and some cool VR, my hopes were dashed and the presentation was over.
But, in a desire to see a quick recap of all I’d seen, I looked again at the Next@Acer page where the live-stream was hosted and I found a little surprise waiting on the page after the keynote.
If you head over to this post-keynote, pre-IFA page from Acer and scroll down past the new Windows machines and past the gaming items, you will see the official (if small and quiet) presentation of the Acer Chromebook R13.
We’ve talked quite a bit about this first Chromebook featuring a MediaTek processor, and now it is officially official.
We hope to see some hands-on from the folks there at the show in the coming days, but what we do have are some firm specs, most of which we already knew:
- MediaTek M8173C Core Pilot™ quad-core processor
- Chrome OS
- 4 GB of LPDDR3
- 16/32/64 GB Storage
That last bit is a very welcome site. As we’ve reported, ASUS’ yet-unreleased Chromebook C301 was the first to offer 64GB as a entry-level option. It seems other manufacturers are getting on board as well, giving at least an option to easily upgrade to a 64GB model. With Android apps on the near horizon, this is a great move by Acer.
We should see the Acer Chromebook R13 in the US in October, starting at $399 for the base 16GB model.
As we learn more about the Acer Chromebook R13, we’ll keep you posted!
