Acer Aspire P3 review

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.