Video: Acer Spin 5 Convertable Laptop Review

There are a lot of convertible laptops in the market and in this video I take a Acers offering the Acer Spin 5. It a traditional style laptop with the addition of a touch screen which you can fold back to give you a tablet form factor. At 10.98mm thick and 1.6kh weight it’s a bit thick to comfortably use as a tablet for a long period but the touch screen is very useful even in laptop mode. Having a touch screen for Windows is prerty much essential for me, I tend to use it for scrolling through web pages and documents.

Screen

The screen runs at 1920 x 1080 and is clear and bright with excellent colour reproduction. It’s pretty reflective but I would rather have that than some of the dull lifeless screens I have seen recently. I really dislike washed out screens and this is certainly not like that.

Keyboard

The keyboard has a short amount of travel with a positive response. It doesn’t suffer from sagging under pressure that some budget laptop do and I found the keyboard very comfortable to use and I would have no problem using this full time. I also like the precision trackpad which supports Windows 10 gestures.

Performance

The combination of the Intel i5-7200U processor, 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD drive mean the laptop is very responsive, especially using Windows 10 apps. Having a fast SSD makes so much difference when using Windows 10, apps open very quickly and the i5 process should make running apps like Photoshop or video editing apps run very well. I tried Minecraft and that worked really well.

Acer say you can get about 10 hours of battery life, I found it was a little less than that and it very much depends on what you are using it for. Light browsing will probably get you close to 8 hours, video editing a lot less.

Ports

The speakers on the Spin 5 aren’t going to win any awards for volume but they are decent enough for listening to music while working or watching videos on. Ports on the Acer Spin 5 include SD card, headphone, 3 x USB 2, a single USB 3 and a full sided HDMI port.

Price

The Acer Spin 5 with 256GB SSD drive costs around £649 on Amazon and the 128GB version costs £521. This market is pretty crowed and there are is a lot of choice, there are machines from Dell, Lenovo and HP that have this format factor but overall I liked the Spin 5.

Video Review

It’s a good combination of traditional design with touch screen. The i5 processor, 8GB RAM and SSD drive means the machine performs well. I also liked the keyboard and trackpad. The Spin 5 is too heavy and too thick to use as a tablet for any length of time but as a traditional laptop with touchscreen this is a good device.

Here is my video review and you can see more views here.