Review: Acer Swift 3

If you sneak a glance at the Swift 3 from Acer, you’d easily mistake this Windows 10 laptop for an Apple MacBook Air, and the inspirations are evident, from the characteristic wedge shape to the chiclet-style keyboard that the original ultraportable made popular. Inspired looks aside, the Swift 3 impresses, and it starts with the subtle gold-finish matte aluminum body which looks premium yet feels durable for less-than-gentle everyday use. It weighs in at 1.5kg and is about 18mm thick, but despite its wedge shape, it manages to pack in two USB 3.0 connectors, an HDMI port, a USB Type-C port and an SD card reader. The size affords it an amply-sized trackpad and a keyboard with big, backlit keys with a comfortable level of travel. I also quite liked the hinge that lets you tilt the display all the way back like a full-flat business-class seat.

And it means business under the hood too! The SF314-51 model I looked at is powered by a 7th Gen Intel Core i7-7500U chip with 8GB of memory and a nippy 256GB solid state drive, though you do have the option of picking up significantly cheaper, lower-specced variants. Windows 10 Home Edition boots up in a snap on this hardware, and apps load quickly thanks to the SSD and enough memory. I had my apprehensions on how this hardware would impact battery life, but the Swift 3 delivers between 7 and 8 hours of daily use, which dipped to just under 5 hours when performing resource intensive tasks. The downward-firing stereo speakers are loud for a laptop this thin.

The only major compromise has been on the 14-inch display which, while it is bright, operates at a sub-par 1366x768 pixel resolution. Ostensibly, this may have been to keep pricing competitive, but the HD resolution isn’t sharp and text/icons are pixelated and lack the crispness of a full-HD display… which mars the experience of what is otherwise a very competent thin-and-light Windows laptop.