Acer Aspire Switch 11 V review

Performance and battery life

Navigating around Windows and the web is fluid and easy thanks to the combination of a sensitive touchpad, a responsive keyboard and the accurate touchscreen.  I had very occasional problems with the touchscreen, where a scroll command would be interpreted as a zoom command, but this happened rarely enough for it to not be a major issue.

The Acer Aspire Switch 11 V uses one of Intel’s new low-power Core M chips. The 800MHz, dual-core M-5Y10c chip in use here has an absolute maximum Thermal Design Point (TDP) of 6W, but because there are no fans, the tablet get surprisingly hot even when idling in Windows, almost to the point of being uncomfortable to hold. This goes some way to explain the abysmal battery life, which we measured at 4h 30m in our moderate usage test. Even under lighter loads, anything more than four hours was starting to push things. This is incredibly disappointing, especially when you consider the Core M processor and the fact that this is a device that would otherwise be well-suited to travelling around with.

At least performance is good. Windows feels snappy and media-heavy web pages load surprisingly quickly and don’t judder around as you scroll around them. We don’t run our full 4K benchmarks on Core M machines, so we ran our easier 1080p tests instead. An Intel Core i3-4030U scores a benchmark score of 100. The Aspire Switch 11 V managed an overall score of 93, including an outstanding score of 138 on the short burst-focused image rendering test.

Advanced 3D games will be beyond the capabilities of this machine, but the likes of Hearthstone and Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition will play just fine.

Conclusion

I can’t help but feel slightly let down by the Aspire Switch 11 V. On the face of it, it’s a fantastic-value 2-in-1 with oodles of storage, a great keyboard dock and decent performance. However, things fall apart in the energy efficiency stakes, which is where a light 2-in-1 should shine. Under five hours of battery life is unacceptable, as are the roasting temperatures on the rear of the tablet. It’s frustratingly close to greatness, but it just falls short. For alternatives see our regularly-updated Best laptops and buying guide.