Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been using the Acer Spin 5 2-in-1 notebook for my day to day tasks. The Spin 5 comes with a fully functional touch screen which can be folded back to use like a tablet. It also packs a 256GB SSD, a backlit keyboard and 8GB RAM.
Build Quality
The laptops outer shell, like quite a few others from Acer, is mainly plastic. This makes it feel as though is lacks any premium quality, and in all honesty it feels a little cheap. The back/lid of the laptop, however, is metal, although you’ll be forgiven for thinking it’s not at first sight because of the cross-hatched finish it has.
Considering it uses plastic rather than metal you’d expect it to be pretty lightweight but at 1.62kgs it isn’t. Measuring in at 19.7 x 329 x 229mm it’s also not the the thinnest of laptops.
On the right side you’ll find the charging port, power button, volume rocker and a micro-SD card slot.
Moving to the left side, there’s a HDMI port a single USB 3.0 port, 2 USB 2.0 ports and a headphone socket.
Performance
- Intel® Core™ i5-6200U processor Dual-core 2.30 GHz
- Intel® HD Graphics (1920 x 1080) 16:9 IPS
- 8GB, DDR4 SDRAM
- Approx. 10 hours of battery life
With all of the hardware in the Spin 5 taken into account, it performs very well. Straight from boot, it takes just seconds to be ready to use, and whilst you certainly won’t be gaming heavily on this machine, in terms of everyday tasks such as browsing the web and editing documents you won’t feel any sluggishness or lagging.
Acer have decided to include a 256GB SSD instead of a hard drive so this also helps to keep performance snappy.
Overall in terms of performance I really have nothing to complain about and during my use I found it to perform great with all ‘basic’ tasks I threw at it.
Keyboard & Trackpad
The keyboard on the Spin 5 is typical of a lot of notebooks we’ve seen from Acer. The keys are shallow but they’re comfortable to use for hours on end. There’s a built in backlight too, so if you’re working in the dark this will make it easier.
The trackpad is plastic which means it may feel a little less smooth than that of a metal or glass trackpad found on higher end devices. Although during my use I really couldn’t tell the difference all that much.
Verdict
The Acer Spin 5 makes for a great entry-level 2-in-1 notebook and it’s specs are pretty decent too. It’s biggest downfall, as you may have guessed is the plastic shell. I would’ve simply liked to have seen more premium materials used in the casing rather than just plastic.
However, if you can look past the plastic (which I can) then the Acer Spin 5 is a great machine. The RRP is £650 but you can pick it up on Amazon for just under £600 currently for the 256GB SSD model, and at this price I think it’s a pretty decent buy.
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