Apple’s MacBook Air alongside Intel’s army
of Ultrabooks has definitely changed the laptop market especially in terms of form
factor and design. The thin form factor of Ultrabooks as well as the use of
metal in their construction are now slowly trickling over to much cheaper
market segments.
Take for example Acer’s Aspire V13, which
was originally unveiled last year at IFA. And although it didn’t get a lot of
attention compared to other devices on display at the event, it’s sensible
combination of the right components and specs makes this laptop something worth
considering if you’re looking for a machine that give you the most bang out of
your buck.
CONSTRUCTION
AND DESIGN
The Aspire V13 is one of the better looking
laptops in its price range. Acer has minimized the use of plastic in this model
with the top cover utilizing a metal cover that features what seems like a
laser-etched pattern. Even the company’s emblem is fashioned out of metal and
the hinges looks like they’re also made from a sturdy material.
The palm rest is also made from metal with
a brushed with matte texture. The screen as well as the bezels around the
display also have a matte look. The track pad is just about the right size at
4.5 inches diagonally. On the other hand, the keyboard keys are made from
plastic and are of the Chiclet style or island style variety.
The bottom of the laptop is made from one
piece of matte-finished plastic. The two speakers which features Dolby Home Theatre
audio technology are found on either side of the laptop. The exhaust vents for
the fan are placed at the posterior end of the device, which is great since
heat is directed away from the user when the laptop is placed on your lap.
PORTS
AND I/O
The Aspire V13 is quite a thin device and
the slim profile means that it has to forego some things that are found in
chunkier devices. Its ports, for instance are limited than other models.
Looking at the right side of the device, there are two USB ports (by the looks
of it, only one is USB 3.0), an HDMI port, an Ethernet port and the charging
port.
On the left side of the device, there’s a
mic and headphone combo jack and an SD card reader. And that’s it. It’s good to
note that the SD card protrudes halfway when inserted on the card reader.
At
the top, there are two light indicators: one for the battery that turns orange
when power levels go below 10% and becomes blue when the device is plugged in
and fully charged (it stays off when power levels are above 10%). The second
light indicator shows when the laptop is on. It turns blue when the device is
in use and turns orange when the laptop is on standby, hibernate or when the
V13’s lid is closed.
Acer did a great job with the Aspire V13’s
keyboard. The keys are well-spaced and there’s enough key travel that it
doesn’t feel like you’re typing on a device that is just a few millimetres
thick. Moreover, the key mechanism allows the Aspire V13’s keyboard to be
comfortable to type on unlike other devices that have gummy keys.
The only two bad things I can say about its
keyboard is that the arrow keys are crammed with the Pg Up and Pg Dn buttons;
and that you need to use the Fn key in order to use the Home and End button. There
are also no indicator lights or even an on-screen notification whenever you
activate the Numlock, Capslock or Scroll lock.
The keyboard also doesn’t have backlight
illumination but seeing as that feature is mostly found in high-end laptops, we
think it’s too much to ask from Acer given the device’s price.
As for the track pad, the V13 comes with an
average to above average pad. It follows the current trend of a singular
clickable pad that supports basic Windows 8 gestures. That means you can scroll
pages using two fingers, zoom in or out by doing a pinch gesture, call up the
charms bar by doing a swipe from the right-most side and access your most
recent apps by swiping from the left.
However, there were times that the track
pad becomes unresponsive. This could be a driver issue so I do hope Acer
releases an update soon that will fix this issue.
For video calling, the Aspire V13 also
comes with an HD camera located at the top bezel of the screen. There’s an
indicator light that goes on whenever the camera is in use and there’s a small
microphone pin hole placed beside the battery LED indicator.
PERFORMANCE
Acer has equipped the laptop with a 4th
Intel Core i5 processor clocked at 1.7GHz that can be boosted to 2.5GHz using
Intel’s Turbo feature. There’s 4GB of RAM, a built-in Intel HD graphics card
and 1TB of storage. And as you might expect given the innards, the V13 isn’t
really what you’d call a high-performance laptop.
The absence of a dedicated graphics card
means you can’t really use it for applications that needs a lot of image and
video processing power such as video editing software and graphics-intense
games (although the sales rep that we talked to said you can play NBA 2K15 on
the device at the lowest resolution).
We also tried using some preinstalled
software including Cyberlink’s PowerDVD and unfortunately we found out that
video editing isn’t really a strong suite for the laptop. The device crashed a
few times when we were trying to use the software to edit a 3-minute video with
minimal layers.
As for ordinary day-to-day tasks, the
Aspire V13 is able to hold itself up against other laptops in the same price
range. Productivity applications run smoothly and depending on the browser
you’re using, you can run at the very least 5-7 tabs simultaneously without
feeling any lag or unresponsiveness.
The battery on the Aspire V13 is a 4-cell
lithium ion, which according to Acer lasts up to 7.5 hours. But of course,
Acer’s claims were made under ideal conditions. Surprisingly, the real-life
battery performance of the device is quite close to the manufacturer’s numbers.
We’ve been using the device for around 3 weeks now and so far, on an average
day, the laptop was able to last for more or less 6 hours.
SOFTWARE
The Aspire V13 runs on Windows 8.1 on the
get go and will likely support a Windows 10 upgrade when the OS is officially
released next month. Unsurprisingly, Acer has included a considerable amount of
bloatware into the device which includes basic productivity apps (spreadsheet,
presentation and documents), multimedia players and some utilities.
In terms of synthetic benchmark scores, the
Aspire V13 scored the following:
Expand Benchmark Score Details
| Laptops Specs |
| Intel Core i5-4210U (1.7GHz @2392Mhz) |
| Intel HD 4400 Graphics |
| 4020MB RAM (Score 130) |
| RAM Speed 7337 MB/s |
|
| Novabench CPU Test (Score 368) |
| Floating Operations/second: 101640444 |
| Integer Operations/second: 293745336 |
| MD5 Hashes Generated/second: 801173 |
| Number of Cores: 2 |
| Manufacturing Process: 22nm |
|
| Novabench Graphics Test (Score 46) |
| 3d frames per second: 154 |
|
| Novabench Hardware Tests (Score 27) |
| Primary Partition capacity: 459GB |
| Drive Write Speed: 52Mbps |
Acer has also taken the liberty of adding third-party
apps on the V13 including Cyberlink’s photo and video editing software, Pokki
start menu, and a number of Metro apps. Unfortunately, Microsoft Office doesn’t
come right out of the box and will have to be purchased separately.
There’s also a 60-day trial version of
McAfee installed and users can purchase a full license after the 2 month period
if they wish to continue using the pre-installed security software. Lastly,
there’s a whole bunch of pre-loaded games from WildTangent games users can play
though on a limited time only.
FINAL
WORDS
The Acer Aspire V13-371 is a very capable
laptop for its actual worth. The device scores some points for its build
quality and its choice of materials, it’s above than average battery life and its
bang-for-the-buck innards. On the down side, the laptop’s software can do a bit
of cleaning up and updating, especially in the drivers section where we had
trouble with the track pad and occasionally with the Wi-Fi.
Although we don’t actually see this model
being the top choice for most people who are planning to get a new laptop, it
does offer consumers a somewhat unique value proposition compared to other
models in the market. If we are to sum it all up, the Aspire V13 provides
consumers with a compromise between power and affordability.
Its form factor coupled with its above
average build quality makes it a cheaper alternative to more expensive
Ultrabooks. At the same time, its more affordable price gives people who are
more inclined to buy an entry-level device a more capable and powerful option.
