The budget-priced Acer Aspire One Cloudbook Windows laptop is an online-oriented laptop designed to get you into the cloud faster with a long-lasting battery. The overall performance and decent features in the Cloudbook are proportionate with its low price tag but does not beat the Dell Inspiron 17 5000 Series that is Non-Touch, has a larger screen, and better performance.
The Acer is no speed demon as it comes with Intel Celeron N3050 1.6 GHz processor, 2GB of DDR3L Onboard Memory and 64 GB Internal Storage, but at least it has the power to get you to the internet and comes with a one-year subscription to Microsoft Office 365 and OneDrive.
Having no particular feature to make it stand out from the crowd, just see the cloudbook as a windows 10 based laptop out to give the Chrome OS-based laptops a run for their money.
Design
The Cloudbook flaunts a mineral gray finish with a dotted textile pattern and scores on its portability, it is tiny and light, just 2.54 pounds and 0.7-inches tall. It’s so light such that it’s not even noticeable in a bag. The Cloudbook is barely thicker and heavier than an 11-inch Apple MacBook Air. This is a budget laptop that scores only where it matters and promises to meet the needs of a basic user.
Just as the name suggests, the Acer aspire comes with a 14-inch display having an HD resolution of 1366×768 pixels. The resolution is much lower than that seen on the Acer Chromebook 13 and the Acer Chromebook 15 (CB5-571-C09S) which come with full HD screens having a resolution of 1920 by 1080. It has a non-touchscreen that displays a bit of screen-door effect whereby the pixels are visible in a grid pattern system.
Having been fitted with an excellent keyboard, the cloudbook’s keyboard was far above our expectations as it provides above-average key travel, and excellent feedback on each keystroke offering a relaxed, desktop-like typing experience unlike most of the budget notebooks which sacrifice the keyboard.
Connectivity
The Cloudbook 14 offers a variety of ports for connections. It comes with one USB 2.0 port and a USB 3.0 port. It features an HDMI port to connect to larger screens or HDTV, a headset jack, an AC adapter power jack, and an SD card reader to help you supplement the local storage. Wireless connectivity is available through dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 is also available.
Performance
With a 1.6-GHz Intel Celeron N3050 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and just 64GB of embedded MMC flash storage, the Cloudbook was never going to be a processing powerhouse. It’s a bit sluggish overall, but the Cloudbook’s performance is fine for basic work tasks like managing your email inbox and editing documents. Its performance was adequate on our Benchmark tests as the system returned a score of 1,561 points on the PCMark8 Work Conventional test, ahead of the E-Fun Nextbook 10.1 but behind the Dell inspiron 17 500 series and the HP Stream 13.
The storage edges out the one seen on the Acer Chromebook 15 that has 16 GB storage and doubles the one seen on the HP stream 13 at 32 GB. It however does not come any closer to the Acer A515-46-R3UB (2022 model) that features a speedy 128GB SSD storage option. A better part of that capacity is reserved for Windows 10 installation, while the rest can be used for installations of third-party programs and users’ files. Thankfully, there’s a built-in SD card reader which enables storage expansion, as well as free 1 Terabyte of Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage for 1 year.
Battery Life
The most outstanding feature for this Cloudbook is its battery which ran on our battery test for 14 hours and 43 minutes, with continuous web browsing over Wi-Fi. The epic endurance edges out those of the premium business notebooks in the market such as the Lenovo Thinkpad T450s, by an hour, doubles the longevity of the HP stream 13 (6:26) and almost triples that of the Lenovo Ideapad 100(4:45).
Verdict
The Acer Aspire One Cloudbook, being a big brother to the Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 11 AO1-131-C9PM and AO1-131-C1G9 Signature Edition, fits well into the lifestyle of a user who doesn’t need to run a lot of software but a typical user who spends most of their day online or using Microsoft office.
That said, there’s a lot to like about this inexpensive Acer A515-46-R3UB, starting with its slim and light chassis, and solid performance on basic mainstream computing tasks. And the decent battery life and extras like a backlit keyboard and fingerprint reader are more reason to buy it. it’s our newest Editors Choice for budget laptops.
