Acer Swift 5 Review – Thin and Light Laptop
You guys, my more regular audience, may know Acer from there actually really impressive value and high end gaming laptops, desktops and monitors, but this video is focusing on something a little different. Acer also have a line of more “lifestyle” type products which includes this, the Swift 5 – a 14” thin and light laptop.
The Swift 5 packs a Core i7 8550U – a quad core that can turbo to 4GHz – although only ever does that when plugged in, otherwise it throttles to below 1GHz most of the time. It’s got 8GB of soldered – non upgradable – RAM and a 240GB SATA M.2 SSD with another M.2 slot spare inside if you do ever want to add some storage.
The battery here is a 36Wh unit which in the PC Mark battery life test only gave 3 hours of usage. You can up that to around 5 hours with the screen set to 0% brightness, but it’s not exactly a match for something like the LG Gram’s 8-10 hours.
Speaking of the display, it’s a 1080p IPS touch screen. This is a real gift and a curse here as the touchscreen functionality is brilliant, especially for casual web browsing or even just ease of use, but the downsides are that it means the panel has a glossy finish meaning in any amount of light it is a glare ridden mess, and also the display isn’t flush with the bezel meaning it’s actually pretty annoying to try and touch anything (like the windows or even close button…) that’s near any edges.
It makes up for it though by being a stunning display. It’s got excellent viewing angles all round, and colour accuracy wise it’s alright, although not much better than most TN panels I’ve looked at with around 93% coverage of the sRGB spectrum, 64% of Adobe RGB and 67% of the DCI P3 spectrum.
Just above the display is the built in webcam and microphones, let’s have a look…
And below the display is the keyboard and trackpad. Let’s start with the good, the track pad. It’s decently sized, has great gesture support and is nice and easy to use. I had a few missed right-clicks, but other than that, it’s great.
Now for the bad, the keyboard. This is just a mess. It’s loud and clicky, while feeling mushy and loose, and the space bar has to be the worst offender here. It’s somewhat passable, but I couldn’t recommend it for most any typing. I even checked with my partner who has a pretty similar style Asus laptop and within 5 key strokes she pull a face of disgust and recoiled from it. Now while my reaction isn’t quite so severe, it does bring down an otherwise impressive laptop.
Performance wise is also a bit hit or miss. On battery, where this is designed to spend most of its time, it throttles the CPU so much that it even struggled to open windows search with a full 5 second delay before registering keystrokes. But, when it’s on charge, the CPU boosts to 4GHz and you get a perfectly smooth, enjoyable experience. Video playback, even on battery, was perfectly fine, although I wouldn’t expect you to be doing much more that web browsing and word processing.
As a final note, the I/O is pretty limited. You’ve got 2 USB 3 ports, 1 HDMI, 1 Type C – not thunderbolt, 4 pole headphone jack and a standard DC in – instead of Type C for power which would be perfectly possible as the power brick only provides about 50W of power,
So what’s the verdict then? Well, if you forget the keyboard and the throttling – and fan noise when it does turbo – it’s actually a fairly decent machine. The bezel on the display and the glossiness are a bit annoying, but not a deal breaker. But when you do factor in the keyboard especially, it gets pretty hard to recommend. For £800 for this model, I’d really expect this to be a much more refined experience, and when a £600, 10 year old Asus laptop has a significantly better typing experience and usage experience, it’s pretty hard to recommend.
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Products shown provided by: Acer
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