If you are looking for a budget laptop then you should consider the Acer Swift 1. The Swift 1 is a 14 inch laptop that sells for under £300, it should meant the needs of anyone wanting a basic laptop for browsing the web, causal games and perform basic office tasks. It has a textured plastic case and weights 1.6kg, so I’s relatively light but the plastic does give it a budget type feel.
Specs and performance.
The Acer Swift 1 has basic components including an Intel Pentium 7200u processor, 4GB RAM and 128 SSD drive. There are two USB 2 ports, 1 USB 3 port, a full sized HDMI port and a SD card reader. The basic specs mean this isn’t going to be a gaming machine or a video editing, but it will be fine for basic tasks like web browsing. The 128GB SSD drive means that it’s nice a quick switching between tasks despite the basic processor small amount of RAM. I found it was great for web browsing, accessing Facebook, reading email and watching videos from Netflix.
Screen
The screen runs at 1366 x 768 so compared to many high end devices this is a low resolution screen and some may find it a bit limiting, but I found it’s not a bad screen. It has good colour reproduction and isn’t glossy or reflective. I know some people don’t like glossy reflective screens so this would be a good option for them. Once again it’s fine for web browsing and watching videos on.
Keyboard and Trackpad
They keyboard is surprising good for the price, I say surprisingly as many budget devices I have used tend to squash down when typing leaving you with a spongy feel while typing. I am happy to say that isn’t the case with the Swift 1 and I found the keyboard very good. The trackpad supports gestures so you can use multiple fingers to do things like task switching or minimising apps. The trackpad comes from Synaptics and isn’t a Precision trackpad which I prefer but it works ok.
Battery Life
One of the up sides about having the low spec Pentium processor is that you get great battery life. I found I got about 10 hours of battery watching videos, browsing the web and reading emails which is really impressive.
Conclusion
This is a nice little laptop for performing basic tasks on. It has excellent battery life and the SSD drive makes it feel nice and quick. At under £300 (on Amazon) it’s good value for money for a basic laptop.
In this video I take a look Acer Swift 1:
[video_embed name=”swift1″]
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