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

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.