Touchscreens are everywhere today thanks to the proliferation of smartphones and tablets. Even Microsoft embraced the touch craze with Windows 8 supporting touch displays right out of the box. Google isn’t a stranger either with its touch-based Chromebook Pixel, but now it’s making sure everybody can afford a touch-based Chromebook.

Google announced on Wednesday that the first affordable touchscreen Chromebook is coming in the form of the Acer C720P. This new Chromebook sports a 11.6-inch touchscreen, a Haswell Intel CPU, 16GB solid state drive, 100GB of Google Drive Cloud Storage and a 30-day free trial to Google Play Music All Access. Like most Chromebooks, it also promises an incredible battery life of 7.5 hours.

Google notes that it has been working on perfecting touch controls in Chrome OS since the launch of the Chromebook Pixel earlier this year. Google says the improvements make touch so intuitive that those using these new Chromebooks find themselves using touch more often than the mouse to control actions on screen.

The Acer C720P Chromebook is available for preorder now at Amazon, and will hit stores in the US this week for $299. That’s a super affordable price for a touchscreen notebook, but the guys of Pawn Stars probably still won’t buy it for fear of being scroogled.

[Image: Google]