We’re always assessing technology that we think can be useful to small-business owners, and one of the better laptops we’ve looked at recently is the Spin 5 from Acer. Stylish, with a slim, brushed aluminum case, it has a ton of features at a street price of about $700 (not including a stylus pen, which runs an extra $50).
What my co-writer, Rob Kay, and I like about it is that it’s both a traditional laptop and a tablet. It has 360-degree hinges so that you can flip it to “tent” mode on your kitchen table and read the Honolulu Star-Advertiser while having your breakfast coffee.
The unit we looked at (Acer Spin 5 SP513-52N-58W) has an 8th Generation Intel CoreTM i5 processor, 13.3-inch multitouch display, 8GB of memory and a fast 256GB SSD. The battery will last you about 13 hours, which is more than enough for your next trip to the San Francisco or Narita, Japan, airport. There’s plenty of power to watch movies, YouTube and, with the 8 gigs of RAM, even some limited gaming. It uses Windows 10, which I’m a big fan of.
The 13.3-inch display balances home and travel tasks. It also helps keep the weight down to 3.3 pounds. It’s not the lightest laptop around, but portable. It’s also got all the connectivity you want: 4 USB ports (including 1 type “C”) and an HDMI port.
The screen is bright, and at Full HD 1080 there’s plenty of resolution. The speakers are more than adequate to assist you in hearing the latest Jordan Peterson video or blasting a blues tune from Freddy King.
As writers, we pay special attention to the keyboard, and the Acer’s is quite good. It’s also backlit, which comes in handy.
Security also has been fleshed out. The integrated fingerprint reader on the touch pad provides biometric controls, and Windows 10 is designed for much-improved security. (Acer offers a temporary Norton Security scan, but you have to pay extra for it after a free trial.)
We liked just about everything on this laptop. The SSD drives all come standard with laptops nowadays, which is a huge step forward. They are fast, dependable and boot instantly. The trade-off is that they don’t have the storage capacity of the older disc drives, so if you want to watch a movie (or have data intensive apps), you’ll need to bring a peripheral drive with you. 256 gigs is not a lot of room, but if most of your storage is in the cloud, it’s not a big deal. (A machine with 512 gigs will run you around $1,000).
The Spin 5 integrates four microphones combined with far-field voice-recognition technology that allow users to access Cortana, a voice-recognition program that responds to commands and answer questions using information from the Bing search engine. We couldn’t, however, get Cortana to work for voice dictation on Google mail. This was our only complaint.
The lesson: The Spin 5 offers tabletlike utility (like being able to read the paper in tent mode), but you’re not always going to get the same utility as an Android or IOS tablet and perhaps it’s asking too much to expect that.
In our opinion, this is a very dependable machine. Rob took it recently on a press trip to Fiji, and it never missed a beat after being slung around Suva and Nadi on his backpack. He tested the Wi-Fi in any number of hotels and on the lanai of many hotels.
The only issue we had with this machine was when we first tested the audio, the speakers popped and hissed like an old vinyl record. We ran the Windows update, and that took care of the problem.
What else did we like? Tech support was excellent, and you don’t have to wait long to get a support person.
One of the intangible pluses about Acer products machine is that you can get it at a good price from Costco, which is always a plus because of its great return policy.
Bang for the buck, this machine is hard to beat.
Mike Meyer is chief information officer for Honolulu Community College. Reach him at mmeyer@hawaii.edu.
