Video: Acer Spin 1 Review

The Acer Spin 1 is entry level 11 inch laptop from Acer with a folding touch screen. Priced around £300 this is a budget device that has some comprises for price but also some nice features. Here is my review and checkout my hands on video at the bottom of this post.

The case is made of plastic with a nice blue finish. It feels solid and well-made and certainly doesn’t feel cheaply made. It’s not the thinnest notebook I have reviewed, in fact it’s rather chunky (20mm thick) and there is a large bezel around the screen but light enough coming in at 1.5kg. There is a full sized HDMI port, headphone jack, one USB 3 port and two USB 2 ports.

The screen is 11.6 inch 10 point touch screen with a glossy finish to it, it has good colour reproduction and unlike some budget devices isn’t washed out. The screen resolution in 1920 x 1080 which is reasonable at this price range. The screen hinges all the way back so you can use it as a tablet, with screen folded over the keyboard it does feel a bit clunky but it’s there if you need it and having a touch screen on a laptop is a really hand feature.

The keyboard doesn’t have a lot amount of travel which I like, and it feels nice and solid to use. You do have to type firmly on the keyboard so it’s probably not that good for light typist but it doesn’t squash down while you type as some budget notebooks I have reviewed tend to do. The trackpad is a precision type and supports Windows gestures like two finger scrolling, 3 and 4 finger taps. It’s probably one of the best points about this laptop.

The performance of the devices is ok but let down by a slow spinning hard drive (500GB). Any activity that needs the hard drive slows the machine down so starting up Windows or open apps can be a very sluggish. It has 4GB of RAM which means once apps are loaded it performs ok but the drive is an issue. The Pentium N4200 isn’t going to set the world on fire but its ok for browsing the web, reading email or watching videos. Anything more tasking slows the device down. The good side to the low spec processor is you get a good 7 hours battery life.

The speakers are reasonable for this price, there is no bass but the volume has a reasonable range.

Overall this is very much a budget device with budget specs. For someone with basic computing needs that wants a touchscreen this is certainly a device worth considering. The Acer Spin 1 comes in various configurations, the unit I am reviewing has a 500GB spinning drive and there is a 64GB eMMC drive option available which would be slight performance improvements and there is a 128SSD version which has a real performance boost but you pay for that gain.

Here is my video look at the Acer Spin 1.