Video: Acer Aspire R11 review, traditional laptop with 360 hinge

Another budget device up for review, this is the traditional styled Acer Aspire R11 laptop. While it’s a traditional style device it also has a touch screen and a 360 degree hinge so its not just your bog standard laptop. This is a low cost device that I found on sale for £194 (on Amazon) so we are talking budget device here.

Design

Like I said this is a traditional laptop design with plastic casing with the main difference being that the screen folds right the way around so you can use like a tablet, in theory this is a great idea but the overall thickness makes that feel a bit clunky. Many will be happy with the traditional design and having a touchscreen is useful, I like using touch screen to scroll around Microsoft Edge. The laptop thickness means there is space for a full sized Ethernet port, USB 3, USB 2 and HDMI ports as well as a headphone socket.

There is a rather large bezel around the 11.6 inch display, so the screen seems to take up about the same amount as a 15 inch laptop. The screen which is very reflective runs at 1366 x 768 so we are talking at the very low end of the scale but it’s sharp and clear. As I said it is very reflective and the colours are a little washed out so the blacks look grey. Overall not the best screen I have seen on a laptop but for the budget price that is to be as expected

The keyboard is a fairly standard island design, not the worst keyboard I have used and certainly no problem to use. The trackpad is also pretty good, it supports two finger scrolling but I couldn’t get any other gestures to work.

Specs

Also budget is the processor, an Intel Celeron N3050 chip with 4GB RAM and 500GB spinning drive. The processor and spinning drive make the R11 feel sluggish when navigating around Windows or using Microsoft Edge, in many ways it felt slower than the Linx 1010B Atom powered tablet I review last week. There is a little delay when loading apps and the whole thing feels slower. The hard drive is actually pretty noisy as you can see hear in my video.

The good side of the low specs is the battery life, Windows reports nearly 11 hours of battery life from a full charge and I got well over 11 hours.

Acer like other OEMS have history of installing lots of unwanted software. The R 11 has AVAST, McAfee Internet Security, Firefox, and other 3^rd party software installed.

Verdict

A traditional style device with the additional of touch and the 360 degree hinge. The main issue is sluggish performance, I prefer a thinner device but I know some people like a clamshell design laptop.

If you can live with the performance issues the budget price makes it worth at least looking at when looking for a cheap laptop.

Here is my video review:

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