Acer Chromebook R13
A flexible companion that’s equally at home editing spreadsheets and playing touchscreen games
You can’t accuse Acer of being short of ideas. The company has no fewer than three Chromebooks in this month’s Labs, plus the Windows-based Spin 3 convertible – but each has its own distinctive design and personality.
Of the three, the R13 is the most interesting and, in our view, the most desirable. At £400 it’s admittedly a step up from the bargain bucket where Chromebooks are often found, but it’s still a lot cheaper than a halfway-decent Windows system.
The first thing you’ll notice about the R13 is how sleek its casing is. Just 16mm thick, it’s the slimmest laptop here, save for the HP Chromebook 13 G1 – and that costs another £171 on top ( see p87). It’s not exactly light, weighing 1.48kg, but the overall impression is highly professional.
Yet it would be wrong to think of this as an entirely serious machine. As the aforementioned HP Chromebook illustrates, there’s nothing wrong with the idea of Chrome OS as a business platform – but the R13 is more than that. Swivel the glossy 13.3in screen around on its 360-degree hinge and it becomes a large but viable tablet, complete with touchscreen, making this an ideal platform for exploring the games and apps available on Google Play.
Unusually, the R13 doesn’t use an Intel processor, but instead a quadcore MediaTek design based on the ARM architecture. It’s also backed up with 4GB of RAM, twice the allocation of Acer’s 11in and 14in Chromebooks. In the JetStream JavaScript benchmark, this gave the R13 a modest performance advantage over its Celeron-based Chrome OS rivals, although not a big enough one to get excited about. In the graphical MotionMark test, things went the other way: here, the R13 fell slightly behind the pack, but again the difference wasn’t big enough that you’d notice it in everyday use.
Of course, there’s more to the user experience than raw performance, but happily the Chromebook R13 delivers here as well. The screen is nice and bright, going up to a maximum of 295cd/m2 and a contrast ratio of 793:1 is solid enough.
Acer has also opted for a Full HD panel, rather than a 1,366 x 768 display, as frequently found in other Chromebooks. That’s a great call, making the screen feel much more spacious – and with a pixel density of 165ppi, text is pleasingly sharp, if not quite perfectly artefact-free.
The built-in speakers, it must be said, aren’t quite so impressive. They’re loud enough for you to happily share a YouTube video with a friend, but there’s not enough music power here to fill a room, and no bass to speak of.
Nor is the keyboard a particular highlight: it’s not too squishy, but the keys seem to have a slightly shorter range of travel than the ZenBook’s. Still, we can’t argue with the large, super-responsive touchpad – plus, of course, you can always use a finger to prod the screen directly.
Another positive is battery life. ARM chips are known for energy efficiency, but even so we were impressed to see the Chromebook R13 deliver a solid 10hrs 58mins of video playback. That’s something you definitely won’t get from a conventional Windows laptop – although note that the Acer Chromebook 14 did even better, amazingly eking more than 12 hours out of a smaller battery.
One final distinctive point is the R13’s use of USB Type-C to charge. This is good, partly because it makes the charger easier to replace, but also because the socket can be used as a data connector when you’re not charging, alongside the regular USB 3 socket and HDMI sockets. There’s also an integrated card reader, although it’s oddly only big enough to take microSD cards, so you may need to acquire a USB reader if your camera uses old-school full-sized cards. It goes without saying that, for some scenarios, you’re better off with a Windows PC, or indeed a Mac. But pretty much anything you might want to do on a Chromebook, you can do very well indeed on the R13. It’s an attractive, well made laptop, with enough power and stamina to make a great everyday work machine – plus a nice bright touchscreen and tablet capabilities that are perfect for entertainment. Certainly you can pay less than £400 for a Chromebook, but for a system as likeable and versatile as this, that’s a very reasonable price indeed.