Acer Aspire V5-572P Touch review

The Acer Aspire V5-572P Touch’s plain iron-grey chassis may not look very inspiring from the outside, but this is a surprisingly thin touchscreen laptop. Measuring just 23mm thick when closed with a weight of 2.2kg, it’s one of the more portable 15.6in laptops we’ve seen in recent months. The laptop’s build quality is also excellent, as we saw hardly any flex in the lid or keyboard tray.

At first glance, it seems the V5-572P Touch has almost no ports, as there are just two USB2 ports, an SD card reader and a combined headphone and microphone jack on the sides. Fortunately, the rest are hidden away on the rear of the laptop, making it easier to tidy away any cables that might be attached. Here you’ll find an HDMI video output, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a USB3 port and a proprietary port for the laptop’s bundled VGA adaptor. It’s a shame the USB3 port isn’t located on the side instead of one of the other USB ports, but we’re pleased to see one nonetheless. There’s plenty of space to store your files, too, as it comes with a 750GB hard disk.

The 15.6in touchscreen was a joy to use. Its 1,366×768 resolution was the perfect size for tapping icons and minimising windows, and Windows 8 gestures were extremely responsive. As we’d expect from a laptop at this price, the screen quality wasn’t brilliant, but it was still adequate for everyday tasks. We measured its sRGB colour gamut at 60.1 per cent, which is around average for a laptop screen. Reds, greens and blues didn’t look particularly deep, but the screen’s glossy finish did help our solid colour image tests look a little more vibrant than laptops with matt screens.

Blacks were high as well, measuring 0.68cd/m2. This meant solid blacks were riddled with grey depending on the angle of the screen, and we found it difficult to get a uniform colour across the whole screen due to the laptop’s narrow viewing angles. This is a common problem on budget laptops, but while it’s not particularly noticeable when browsing the web or typing text documents, it made a big difference to the clarity of our high contrast test images.

With a measured contrast ratio of 334:1, we found it difficult to see any kind of detail in our high contrast test photos unless we were looking at the screen head-on. That said, blacks were deeper and colours looked a lot more natural than the V5-572P Touch’s almost identical rival, the Asus VivoBook X550CA. The V5-572P Touch’s screen was also much brighter than the X550CA, making it easier to look at in lower lighting conditions.

This gives the V5-572P Touch a big advantage over the VivoBook, but its 1.9GHz Intel Core i3-3227U processor isn’t that much faster when it comes to raw processing power. It’s still perfectly fast enough for word processing and surfing the internet, but with a score of 34 in our multimedia benchmarks, the laptop may struggle if you have lots of applications open simultaneously.

This isn’t too much of a problem if you’re only going to be using the laptop for simple office tasks, but the laptop’s integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 chip isn’t cut out for playing 3D games. It only just passed our Dirt Showdown test with an average of 17.6fps on High quality at a 1,280×720 resolution, but we did see a more playable frame rate of 29.7fps when we set the quality to Low and disabled anti-aliasing. This is perfectly acceptable if you don’t mind playing games on the lowest detail settings, but you may be better off sticking with 2D titles for the smoothest frame rates.

The keyboard was great to work on. The keys were a little flat, but they still provided plenty of tactile feedback and were well-spaced alongside its numeric keypad. The large all-in-one touchpad was also one of the better touch pads we’ve seen on a laptop of this size, as its smooth surface made it easy to use multi-touch gestures and Windows 8 shortcuts. The clickable lower half was also precise and accurate when opening files on the desktop, as it didn’t make our cursor shoot up the page or drag files across the screen by accident.

The V5-572P Touch’s battery life was even more impressive. It lasted 7h 52m in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness, which is almost double what the Asus VivoBook X550CA managed under the same conditions. This is superb for an Ivy Bridge-based laptop, as we’d normally only expect to see this kind of battery life from a Haswell system, so you should be able to work almost all day on the V5-572P Touch on a single charge.

Our main concern is the price. At £550, the Acer Aspire V5-572P Touch is a good value touchscreen laptop, but the almost identical Asus VivoBook X550CA is a lot cheaper. The longer battery life and brighter screen may be worth the extra expense if you’re desperate for a touchscreen, but if all you want is a great value laptop to use at home, the non-touch Asus X552CL is a better buy. This touchscreen laptop has a great keyboard and superb battery life, but it’s a little expensive compared to the competition