In the Windows laptop market, the budget range probably witnesses the most intense competition, even more fierce than the premium segment with its array of gaming laptops and ultrabooks. But this has not prevented a deluge of products from manufacturers every quarter and with a dizzying range of features.

Features once seen only in the premium segment such as touch screens and SSD storage is now common in the entry-level market. As was expected, 2-in-1 devices have also entered the highly competitive entry-level laptop market.

BASIC DESIGN

Acer’s entry-level 2-in-1 for the Windows laptop market is the Acer One 10. As the name suggests, it has a 10-inch touchscreen running at an extremely modest 1280×800 resolution. This is even lower than the 1366×768 resolution of the manufacturer’s other budget device, the Aspire Switch 11 (see other review).

Unfortunately, the Acer One 10’s screen is not the brightest around or the one with the highest contrast ratio. This means that blacks are not as deep as they should be and bright colours appear slightly smudged.

ATOMIC POWER

The 2-in-1 is powered by an Intel Atom Z3735F CPU, a Bay Trail-generation quad-core part running at between 1.33 and 1.88GHz. As expected from such a competitively priced laptop, the GPU is also an integrated one from the same manufacturer.

The laptop is equipped with 2GB of DDR3 RAM and 32GB of storage. Weighing just 640gms, the Acer One 10 has a 5740mAh battery and 2MP front and rear facing cameras. Although 2MP is very low resolution by the standards of even entry-level smartphones, it is adequate for the purposes of video applications in a laptop such as Skype.

The device also includes Bluetooth, a micro SD card reader, USB 2.0 port on the docking station and a micro HDMI port. Software support comes in the form of a 32-bit version of Windows 10 and Office 365 is also included.

RIGHT FOR OFFICE

So how does the Acer One 10 actually perform? Despite the highly competitive price of the device, it is quite usable for office work or during travel. Playing recent games is almost out of the question due to the CPU, GPU and memory constraints. It is also perfectly

Price: RM

SPECS

Maximum Resolution: 1280×800

CPU: Intel Atom Z3735F

GPU: Intel HD Graphics

Storage: 32GB

Weight: 640gms

RAM: 2GB

VALUE                     9/10

PERFORMANCE     6/10

FEATURES             7/10

DESIGN                   7/10

USABILITY              7/10

SCORE                    7.2

VERDICT

A very affordable Windows convertible