Video: Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14 £177 budget notebook

Last year Acer launched is Cloudbook range of laptops aiming to bring Chromebook’s low price to Windows notebooks. The Cloudbook 14 is a budget device (£177 on Amazon) that has budget components to keep the price down. So with the basic specs is it good enough for the budget user?

First off I have to say Iit doesn’t feel like a £177 device. The dark grey casing is well made if not particularly exciting, it looks business like and feels like it could stand being on the road. The laptop weights 1.6 kg which is about average for this type of device.

The keyboard is actually pretty good for typing on, probably the best budget laptop keyboard I have used recently. There is only a small about of travel and it is very comfortable to type on. The trackpad supports two finger scrolling and is large enough for it to be useful.

An area where you can see the budget pricing is with the display. The 14 inch screen by modern standards is very low res running at 1366 x 768 and the colours look washed out and flat. One good point is that the screen is not reflective, some devices I have reviewed recently have been very reflective with a lot of glare but this not the case here.

The specs are as you would expect very basic. It has Intel Celeron N3050 processor, 2GB RAM and 32GB eMMC drive. One advantage of a low spec processor is that you get really good battery life, I found over 10 hours with light web browsing. The downside is that everything is a slow, navigating around Windows a little sluggish and opening apps is slow. Opening a couple of tabs in Microsoft Edge ran the CPU almost at 100% so while pages load up ok the whole laptop does feel a bit slow. Also a problem is a 32GB eMMC drive, out of the box my review unit has 9GB left which is about the minimum Windows will run and while you do have the option of using an SD card to store data on 32GB is the bare minimum.

For connectivity there is a HDMI port, a USB 3 port, USB 2 port, full side SD card and a headphone port. There is also a basic 640 x 360 webcam which is just about ok for Skype calls. One good thing about the Cloudbook is that it comes with a year Office 365 Personal which includes 1TB of cloud storage which is good.

For £177 I think this offers good value for money if you needs a basic laptop. For using with Facebook, email and browsing the specs are just about good enough and you get great battery performance. The tiny 32GB on board storage is limiting, you can just about get a couple of apps installed. If you want a full sized laptop for under £200 then it is worth checking out, it is a good alternative to a Chromebook as its running Windows 10 you can install Chrome if you wish.