Acer has been one of the major contributors to Chrome OS for a while now. The second 15.6-inch Chromebook is preparing to roll out with new internals and an even cheaper price point at $199.

The three month time window has not left a great amount of time to update internals. Acer has dropped a few of the specs to meet with the new price point -- which is $50 cheaper than the Chromebook 15 CB5-571 launched at CES 2015.

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Even though it retains the same 1366 x 768 display, the Chromebook 15 CB3-531 features a lower spec dual-core Intel Celeron chip, 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of onboard storage compared to 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of onboard storage on the more expensive option.

Acer will not offer a higher resolution option for the CB3-531, meaning HD is all the user can hope for unlike the CB5-571 that comes with a 1080p option for an extra $50 on top of the $249.99 for the base model.

Despite the changes to the internals, Acer is confident the Chromebook 15 CB3-531 will be capable of 11.5 hours of battery life, a decent amount for a low-cost netbook.

The new Chromebook will also feature dual-band Wi-Fi access, Bluetooth 4.0, USB 3.0 and 2.0, HDMI and an SD card reader. That's a whole lot of ports and networking connectivity, much more than Apple's MacBook.

Even though the 15-inch Chromebook CB3-531 might not be the best suited for those that want professional grade performance, Chrome OS has never been about that. It's always been focused on web-based tasks.

For that, Acer's new Chromebook should work just fine. It might have 2 GB less RAM but as long as 10 tabs aren't open in Google Chrome, that should be enough to utilize any service or site on the web.

The $199 price also puts the Chromebook in contention with low-end Android and Windows tablets, both of which come for a heftier price with similar internals. The advantage of the Chromebook is it offers a keyboard and trackpad -- the latter is the largest on Chrome OS according to Acer.

Acer will launch the Chromebook 15 CB3-531 later this year, targeted at education and consumers.

TagsAcer, Chrome OS, Laptop, Chromebook