Acer Spin 5

Acer’s sleek convertible has a stylish stylus, but is this Spin-ster the perfect match for your lifestyle?

The Spin 5 is Acer’s flagship consumer 2-in-1 and although you end up paying a little more for it than the similarly specced Swift 5 laptop, there’s a few additional handy features for anyone looking to use this convertible as a tablet. Acer has collaborated with specialist stylus and digital drawing pad creators, Wacom, to help give the Acer Active Stylus a smooth and natural feel when writing and drawing. Using it with Windows 10’s write to type functionality in the search bar the stylus felt comfortable and responsive; it also offered a slightly neater flow than what your hand actually draws in applications like Paint, so you should be able to get it working well with your drawing app of choice.

The 2020 Spin 5 comes in other configurations internationally but in Australia it uses an Intel Core i5-1035G4 CPU and 8GB of RAM, which will be more than enough for most people’s working needs. It is about 20% less powerful than the devices running i7 processors with 16GB of RAM here, so you’d probably steer clear if you plan to do a lot of photo editing or you’re running intense design software. But it’s got more than enough for web browsing, office applications, simple drawing apps and a bit of light gaming.

Battery life was decent with the device lasting eight hours and 15 minutes in 1080p movie playback and using the PCMark Battery Benchmark nets 10 hours and 35 minutes, so you’ll be fine to get a full day’s working battery for light tasks even at full brightness.

Acer followed Microsoft’s Surface devices with a 3:2 format display at a 2256 by 1504 pixel resolution. This 13.5 inch screen has a thick bottom bezel, but the device still looks premium, with an overall 80% screen to body ratio.

The trackpad and keyboard both feel good to swipe/type on respectively and there’s no shortage of connectivity options with a HDMI out, 2 x USB Type-C and a microSD Card reader (alongside a couple of regular USB Type-A sockets and a 3.5mm audio jack). The hinge design also struck a good balance between offering support at all angles without being unmovable.

The 256GB storage is a little small to be ideal and it’s also not the fastest we’ve encountered, but it is still connected via a PCIe lane so it’ll be between two and four times as fast as any SATA SSDs.

The 2-in-1 also features an Intel Wi-Fi 6 network adapter, so you won’t have to worry about any lag when you’re connected to a local area network.

“Acer has collaborated with specialist stylus and digital drawing pad creators, Wacom, to help give the Acer Active Stylus a smooth and natural feel when writing and drawing.”

A neat 2-in-1 with a lightweight stylus that is great for basic office tasks.