Acer Aspire R11 hands-on review

At its launch event in New York, Acer announced a whole bunch of new products including smartphones, wearables, tablets, laptops and PCs. One of the more interesting items is a laptop and tablet in one which has a 360 degree hinge. Here’s our Acer Aspire R11 hands-on review. Read: The best tablets.

Also see: Best Black Friday Laptop Deals

Acer is classing the Aspire R11 (R3-131T) a notebook but it can also be used as a tablet despite not having a detachable keyboard like the Aspire Switch range. We’re seeing more of these types of devices come to market with Lenovo leading the way with its Yoga products. Also see: Best new tablets coming in 2016.

One of the main differences compared to rivals is that the Aspire R11 is affordable, something you can typically rely on Acer for. It will start at £299 in the UK which is a little more than the new Switch 10 E.

Like some of the other products announced in New York, namely the Switch 10 and Iconia One 8, the R11 uses a plastic body with a patterned texture like fabric. It looks quite nice and does provides grip when holding it in the hand.

It’s not exactly svelte at 20.9mm and 1.58kg but this is reflected in the price. It would be nice have the option to spend a little more on a thinner and lighter model with a metal chassis.

The hinge works well and means you can use the Aspire R1 in different modes: laptop, tablet, display and tent. As with other devices, we’re not convinced by using a device like this in tablet or tent mode but the other two are useful.

For this price you’re not going to get amazing specs so the Aspire R11 is powered by an Intel Pentium or Celeron processor with up to 8GB of RAM. Performance seems ok during a hands-on time but we’ll need to put the R11 to the test in our lab before we can comment fully.

There’s no SSD for speedy performance, instead you’ll get a 500GB hard drive which can be up to 1TB depending on the SKU. Acer touts a battery life of up to eight hours.

The Aspire R11 is a diddy customer compared to most which have a 360 hinge. It has an 11.6in screen which may be too small for some people depending on what type of things you want it for. A resolution of 1366 x 768 is understandable for the price but viewing angles are very poor so we’d like at least the option to buy the R11 with an IPS display. Poor viewing angles and the hinged design don’t really match.

There’s little in the way of other specs with an HD webcam built in and a handful of ports down one side. You get two USB ports, full-size HDMI and ethernet.