Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14 review: A cheap but productive laptop

Google’s Chromebooks have helped create a whole new type of entry-level, budget-friendly laptop – ignoring a few exceptions like the £800 Google Chromebook Pixel and £1,095 Dell Chromebook 13, of course. With their focus on web-based tasks and storing the vast majority of your files in the cloud, Chromebooks have become a great low-cost option for anyone who spends most of their computing time inside an internet browser.

However, good cheap laptops aren’t just limited to Chromebooks, as there have been plenty of Windows-based alternatives popping up lately as well, including Acer’s Aspire One Cloudbook 14. This 14.1in laptop costs just £150, making it around £20 cheaper than the Dell Inspiron 11, and it manages to hit all the right boxes.

Design and Keyboard

Admittedly, the Aspire One Cloudbook 14’s rather bland, utilitarian design is hardly going to get your pulse racing. While the outer lid’s textured, perforated finish feels great to the touch, it’s a far cry from the bright, vibrant colours of the Inspiron 11. It doesn’t help that Acer’s chosen a grey matt interior either, but at least it’s reasonably portable, as the whole laptop only weighs 1.6kg and measures 17.9mm thick.

The 14.1in form factor also allows for a decent-sized keyboard. Sadly, it’s not particularly comfortable to type on. The tray doesn’t have as much flex as other cheap laptops I’ve seen, but the keys don’t have a lot of travel and the key action is relatively loud. As a result, I found myself making more typos than I would have liked, but, as with most keyboards, you do start to get used to it after a while.

The touchpad, on the other hand, is surprisingly good. It’s a generous size and it’s very responsive, as the coating Acer’s applied allows your swipes and gestures to glide effortlessly over its surface. The integrated mouse buttons have a distinct click action, too, making them very easy to use.

Ports and storage

The Aspire One Cloudbook 14 comes with a good set of ports, too. There are two USB ports available, one of which is the faster USB3, and there’s also a full-sized HDMI output and headset jack. More importantly, it has an SD card reader, which is vital when the device has just 32GB of eMMC storage, which, once you’ve taken into account Windows 10 and Acer’s pre-installed software, only leaves you with approximately 10GB of storage.

Of course, given the laptop has ‘Cloudbook’ in its name, it’s clear Acer’s intending its users to rely on cloud storage rather than storing the vast majority of their files locally. It even comes with 1TB of free OneDrive storage to that effect, as well as a year’s subscription to Office 365 Personal, the latter of which normally costs £60. This makes the Cloudbook 14 even more of a bargain than it already is, but it’s still useful to have an SD card reader on hand if you need to add extra capacity.

However, you probably won’t want to leave an SD card in the laptop permanently, as any inserted card will protrude from the edge of the Cloudbook 14 by about a centimetre. Still, you can always buy a reduced-size SD card if this is going to be a problem, as Macbook owners have been using this workaround for years.

Performance

As you’d expect for an inexpensive Windows laptops, the Cloudbook 14 is powered by one of Intel’s Celeron processor rather than one of its more powerful Core models. In this case, it’s the dual-core 1.6GHz Intel Celeron N3050, as recently seen in the Dell Inspiron 11.

Paired with 2GB of RAM, performance is as good as you’d expect for such a low-end specification. If all you’re going to be using it for is editing documents and browsing the web, the Cloudbook 14 will do just fine. Anything more taxing, however, and it will start to struggle.

It wasn’t able to complete our 4K benchmarks, for instance, but when I re-ran our tests using 1080p video instead, it only managed an overall score of 30. For what it’s worth, this was only 2 points behind the Dell Inspiron 11’s score in our 1080p benchmarks, but neither are going to set speed records.

Thankfully, the Cloudbook 14 more than makes up for its performance shortfall with its excellent battery life. With 11 hours and 20 minutes of continuous video playback in our battery life test, the Cloudbook 14 easily matches Toshiba’s equally inexpensive Satellite C40-C, and you should be able to get even more battery life under more general use as well.

Display

The 14.1in display has a 1,366×768 resolution, which is pretty standard for budget laptops. Its viewing angles are rather narrow, especially on the horizontal plane, but it’s perfectly usable. I’ve certainly seen far worse screens for the money, and it definitely beats the display on the Inspiron 11.

It’s still not brilliant, though, as its sRGB colour gamut coverage of just 61.8% means it isn’t ideal for colour sensitive work like photo editing. Combined with its low contrast ratio of 423:1 and mediocre black levels of 0.56cd/m2, everything ends up looking a little washed out and uninspiring. This won’t be a problem if you’re going to spend the day looking at text documents, but it nevertheless leaves something to be desired. It’s also not particularly bright, reaching just 241.2cd/m2 on its maximum settings.

Conclusion

Still, you need to make some allowances when you’re only spending £150, and the Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14 certainly puts forward a compelling case when you compare it side by side with Dell’s Inspiron 11. The Cloudbook 14 also has the edge over the Toshiba Satellite C40-C, as it manages to match the C40-C’s build quality and battery life while also costing £50 less – and that’s before you add in the extra value provided by a year’s free subscription to Office 365 Personal and the 1TB OneDrive storage.

It may not be particularly fast or have the best display, but as long as you can work within the Cloudbook 14’s limitations, this is as good as you’re going to get for under £200. It wins a Recommended award.