Home » Review: Acer Spin 5 – An affordable 2-in-1 with decent specs

Review: Acer Spin 5 – An affordable 2-in-1 with decent specs

 

The Acer Spin 5 is a 2-in-1 laptop that comes with a touch screen that can be folded over to make it feel like a tablet, decent specs and an SSD. While it isn’t the cheapest laptop out there, it offers a lot in a somewhat plasticcy package.

 

Specifications

A quick look at the specs:

  • Windows 10 Home
  • Intel® Core™ i5-6200U processor Dual-core 2.30 GHz
  • 13.3″ Full HD (1920 x 1080) 16:9 IPS
  • Intel® HD Graphics 520 with Shared Memory
  • 8 GB, DDR4 SDRAM
  • 256 GB SSD
  • Backlit keyboard
  • Around 10 hours of battery life
  • 360 degree dual torque hinge

Look and feel

As far as look and feel goes, it doesn’t look much different to the same class of laptops. The laptop itself feels very plastic, and lacks any serious rigidity. In fact, our review model seemed to be ‘opening’ up a bit. No worries, as a bit of pressure and it all snapped back into shape. This was mainy due to the fact that the person who reviewed this before us seemed to have helped themselves to some of the screws from the bottom.

Another thing this laptop gives you is a big bezel, despite having a fairly decent display.

The top of the device comes with a metal top featuring a cross hatched design.

The right side features a power key, volume rocker key, a micro SD Card slot and the charger port.

The left side has an HDMI port, a USB 3 port as well as a couple of USB 2.0 ports.

It is neither the thinnest nor the lightest of laptops, but instead it sits happily in the comfortable zones for both thickness and weight. This along with the long battery life makes it an ideal work laptop.

Performance

As far as performance goes, the i5 processor, the 8GB RAM and the SSD combine to give you a very decent set of specs. This is noticeable as soon as you boot the device up. It takes seconds to be ready to take action. While this isn’t the machine to do graphics processing or gaming, any office tasks such as browsing, word processing and spreadsheets happen happily.

You do constantly hear the fans whir in and out though, which means it is either designed to keep the system very cool, or the processor is working hard. Either way, we didn’t really notice anything to complain about. As long as you can live with the sound of the fans.

Interaction (keyboard, touchpad, touch screen)

Like most 2-in-1s, it comes with a touch screen. Touchscreens on Windows is still bit of a ‘what am I supposed to do’ kind of a topic. Personally, I rarely use them, and when I do, it is often accidental. However, in general usage, it worked absolutely fine, and had a nice feel to it.

The keyboard is fairly decent, and has good feedback. The keys are a bit shallow, but in the world of MacBook and MacBook Pros, this really isn’t anything worth worrying about.

A precision touchpad completes the picture, making it a decent device to play with. Once again, nothing to complain about.

Battery Life

The device promised 10 hours, and it hit that one over and over again.

Media

The screen offers a fairly decent performance, and is great to watch films and such like. The speakers seem to have a very subtle distortion on them, specially at higher volumes. This could make watching films on this a bit annoying, but drop the volume down and you should be fine.

Bloatware

Sadly, like all Acer machines we have tried so far, it comes with its fair share of bloatware. You can manually get rid of a lot of them, which we recommend you do.

More information

More information on the Acer Spin 5 can be found on the Acer website.

The model we tried retails for around £650, and can be found at various online retailers such as Amazon.

Verdict

The joy this device brings is pretty much its downfall. It is a fairly average package offering decent specs. This makes it bit of a dull device, meaning you won’t have much to write home about. However, the specs are great, the price is okay, and as long as you don’t mind the build, it is a great machine.

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