Acer Aspire R11 (R3-131T) review

The Acer Aspire R11 is a small but exceedingly well formed convertible laptop that looks like it’s built to last. This 11.1in convertible has a chunky hard plastic shell that looks like the sort of thing you’d buy to protect your smartphone. It feels like it’s well protected against knocks and scrapes, which is something you rarely get with more expensive laptops, let alone cheap convertible models.

Specification-wise, it’s more or less the equivalent of the Toshiba Satellite C40-C netbook. The R11 has a dual-core 1.6GHz Intel Celeron N3050 processor along with 2GB of RAM. This is not a performance device by any stretch of the imagination, but if you choose your tasks carefully you should get by without too many stutters and stalls. The convertible scored 7 overall in our benchmarking tests, including a score of 17 in the single core-focussed image editing test. This is not a laptop for intensive multimedia tasks; it’ll play video just fine and you’ll be able to work on documents, emails and browse the web, but you might be left twiddling your thumbs on a few occasions while you wait for the laptop to finish crunching numbers.

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One area where the R11 soundly beats the Toshiba Satellite C40-C is in storage capacity. Instead of the paltry 32GB of eMMC storage you’ll find on most netbook-style devices, the R11 comes equipped with a proper 500GB mechanical hard disk. This is both a blessing and a curse; the high capacity is welcome, but it’s far from the fastest drive in the world and makes Windows load slower and feel less responsive than with solid state memory.

On the upside, you’ll have enough room to store video, music and audio files on the laptop, so won’t be reliant on the cloud. The laptop managed an excellent 9h 5m in our light-use battery benchmark, too, so you should be able to take advantage of all those media files.

The impressive battery hasn’t added to the laptop’s bulk, however; it cuts a relatively svelte figure at just 1.6kg and 21mm thick. That’s still too heavy for you to use it as a conventional tablet with the keyboard flipped all the way back, at least for any great length of time, but it’s certainly light enough to carry around in a bag without weighing you down. Despite its small size, you still get a full complement of the ports you’d expect from a conventional laptop. The 802.11ac Wi-Fi is supplemented by a gigabit Ethernet port, and you also get two USB ports, one of which is USB3-compatible. There’s a 3.5mm headset jack and an SD card reader, too.

The laptop’s 13.3in touch screen isn’t bad; it’s relatively bright at 253cd/m2, but colour coverage is in the below-60% of sRGB range, and contrast is fairly low at 433:1, meaning finer details in images and movies are lost. The screen hinge has well-judged resistance, being easy to move when you’re changing screen position, but staying put when you need it to.

The laptop’s speakers use ‘paper diaphragm’ technology, which is designed to create a minimal amount of distortion when playing high-frequency sounds at maximum volume. We were genuinely impressed with the speakers in our tests; even once we cranked the volume up to 100%, we heard no distortion whatsoever in both music and dialogue, which is a serious feat for such a small laptop. Unsurprisingly, these small speakers still can’t handle low-frequency sounds so if you want to hear every explosion and every bass drum beat, you’ll need headphones or external speakers.

The keyboard’s keys have a light and responsive action, and the laptop’s 13.3in form factor leaves enough room for larger hands. Unfortunately, we had some serious problems with the touchpad once we’d upgraded to Windows 10.

After the upgrade, we started to see significant stuttering, alongside warning beeps from the Synaptics touchpad driver software. Most touchpad gestures, even the most basic swipes and drag-select commands, failed to work on most occasions, resulting in some extremely frustrating situations when attempting to edit documents and send emails. It’s particularly annoying because Acer claims the R11 is ready for Windows 10, and is fully supported for a free upgrade. In our experience, we found this simply isn’t the case.

We were able to partially solve these problems with an update downloaded from the Synaptics website, and although the stuttering mostly disappeared, there were still occasions when the driver software would fail and start beeping. The problem was most serious when the processor was busy with other tasks. Acer has stated in support forum posts (regarding other laptops upgraded to Windows 10 with the same problem) that investigations are ongoing, but as yet a complete solution has not been found.

For this reason, it’s very difficult to recommend the Acer R11 as a Windows 10 laptop. If you buy it and don’t complete the Windows 10 upgrade, you’ll have a competent Windows 8.1 machine, but Windows 10 should be avoided for the moment. For alternatives see our full list of the best laptops you can buy today.

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