Acer Aspire P3 review

The Acer Aspire P3 is an Ultrabook hiding under the guise of a tablet. Its aluminium frame and glossy black bezel look great and the tablet is a slim 9mm thick. It’s much more streamlined than any other Windows 8 tablet we’ve seen, but it’s still a little too heavy to hold in one hand for any prolonged period of time.

Thankfully, the Aspire P3’s aspirations as an Ultrabook means it comes with a keyboard cradle that doubles up as a stand and carry case. Its leather backing makes it look very smart and feels like a step up from the solid plastic keyboard docks we’re used to seeing with products like this.

It’s an attractive bundle and Aspire P3’s 11.6in IPS display looks just as gorgeous. Its glossy finish really helped our solid reds, greens and blues jump out of the screen. Blacks and whites were deep and true as well, and it made a real difference in our high contrast images. We were able to see a great level of detail in all our test photos and colours remained rich and vibrant throughout. It’s one of the best tablet displays we’ve seen, and even though there’s no screen tilt available, its wide viewing angles meant we could see what was onscreen from a variety of different angles.

We were also impressed to see the Aspire P3 had a ten-point touchscreen. We would normally expect to see cheaper two- or five-point displays on a tablet of this price, but more touch points makes it makes it much easier to navigate the desktop and use touch-friendly apps from the Windows 8 Store. Its 1,366×768 resolution feels about right for the screen size, as icons are big enough to tap accurately with your fingers. This is just as well, as the keyboard cradle doesn’t have a touchpad, so you’ll need to use the touchscreen to open files and browse the web if you don’t have a mouse.

The Aspire P3 is quite light on ports, as all you get is a single USB3 port, a micro HDMI video output and a combined headphone and microphone jack. You’ll have to use the USB port to charge the Bluetooth keyboard as well, so this might not always be available for other USB devices if you want to transfer files and use the keyboard at the same time, for example.

Its two integrated speakers are located on the bottom side of the tablet. We were quite impressed with its sound quality overall, as we could hear a little bit of bass as well as a reasonably full body of sound, but they had a tendency to become slightly muffled when we placed the tablet in the keyboard cradle. They’re not the best speakers, but they’re certainly better than other laptop speakers we’ve heard.

A 5-megapixel camera sits on the rear of the tablet. Our outdoor shots were a little hazy in direct sunlight, but on the whole they showed lots of detail and had very accurate colours. Noise was minimal, but this increased quite a lot when there was less light available in our indoor photos. It coped very well when all the main overhead lights were on, but there was a noticeable amount of rainbow-coloured speckle when we switched over to our side lights, and it only grew worse when we turned them all off and relied solely on our fan lights. We wouldn’t recommend filming any video in low lighting conditions either, as it really struggled to focus and keep up with moving objects in our video test. Its level of detail was also quite patchy, with most objects appearing slightly blurry onscreen.

Sadly, there are a few issues that prevent the Aspire P3 from being our Ultrabook hybrid of choice, and these mainly stem from the keyboard cradle. It has full-sized Chiclet style keys, but they’re not very bouncy and we were constantly making mistakes while we were typing due to unregistered letters and symbols. There’s quite a lot of flex in the keyboard as well, particularly toward the edges, and pressing down both corners revealed how unevenly it sat on our desk.

It’s a shame, as the Aspire P3 is far more capable than other tablet-based hybrids we’ve seen, but it’s also not quite as fast as a traditional Ultrabook. Our review sample came with a 1.4GHz Intel Core i3-3229Y processor and 4GB of RAM. This is one of Intel’s new Ivy Bridge ultra-low voltage chips that are even more energy efficient than previous Ultrabook processors, but its lower clock speed means there’s been a slight compromise on performance. It scored 25 overall in our multimedia benchmarks, which puts it a good 15 points ahead of the Atom-based models, but an Ultrabook with a Core i3-3217U chip is roughly five points faster. This is still quick enough for ordinary tasks like word processing and web browsing.

For graphics, it has to rely on its integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 chip, but it’s not particularly suited to playing 3D games as it failed our Dirt Showdown test. It should still be able to play older titles as well as games from the Windows 8 Store, and its 128GB SSD provides a reasonable amount of room to store them in, too.

Its battery life was good, but not particularly outstanding. It lasted 5 hours and 33 minutes in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness, which is reasonable for an Ultrabook, but fairly poor for a tablet, compared to an iPad’s near ten-hour battery life.

The Acer Aspire P3 is definitely one of the better Windows 8 tablets we’ve seen, but its keyboard cradle and slightly underpowered processor means it’s not quite good enough to be a truly viable alternative to a traditional laptop at this price. A large part of its appeal will rest on its convenience as a tablet, so if your budget doesn’t quite stretch to the Microsoft Surface Pro, then the Acer Aspire P3 is the next best thing.