Acer Swift 3
A premium laptop without the price tag, but the screen is a disappointment
SCORE★★★★☆ PRICE £500 (£600 inc VAT) from uk-store.acer.com
It’s hard to believe that a laptop as luxurious as the Acer Swift 3 is available for £600. The aluminium design belongs to a premium laptop, and at 18mm it’s about as slim as 14in laptops get. We went hunting for signs of cost-cutting in the build quality, but returned almost empty-handed. The Swift 3’s only (and literal) rough edge is where the keyboard surround meets the base at the chassis’ front.
It’s not style over substance, either. A comprehensive lineup of Type-A USB ports complement the single USB-C connector, along with an HDMI output, SD card reader and a combo audio jack. 802.11ac Wi-Fi is included in the faster 2x2 configuration, maxing out at 866Mbits/sec.
The touchpad is enormous and extremely accurate, and while the keyboard has a few layout oddities, such as the weird, split left-Shiftmeets-backslash key, there’s a nice spring to the typing action. Acer also fits in a fingerprint reader, which delivered instant, accurate sign-ons once in use.
£600 will nets you the base level Swift 3 with a Core i3-7100U chip, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. This delivers more than adequate performance for mainstream applications, but those looking for serious horsepower should choose the £749 variant with an eighth-generation Core i5-8250U. Results in our benchmark tests put the Swift 3 in the middle of the slower Core i3 pack. Battery life, however, is anything but mediocre: the Swift 3 can keep working for over ten hours from a single charge.
Why, then, isn’t the Swift 3 going home with an award? Well, it’s a close match for the Asus ZenBook UX410, but it falls behind on screen quality. sRGB gamut coverage sits at under 60% where the Asus hits 92%, while brightness levels top out at a mediocre 267cd/m2. Sound is a less important factor – the Swift 3 goes loud but rather tinny – but as good as the Acer is, the similar ZenBook UX410 comes out slightly stronger overall.
There’s little in it, though, so if you’re swayed by the fingerprint reader, superior battery life and 8GB of RAM, the Acer is fine choice.