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ACER Switch 10 Full HD Review
Acer Aspire Switch is Acer’s new 2-in-1 (or convertible) device. It follows Asus’ idea that made Transformer T100 so popular improving it where possible (and falling short elsewhere).
Acer Switch 10 – as odd as it might seem – is a device for people who find tablet to be more toys than tools, but at the same time considered netbooks to be too slow to be useful either. Acer Switch 10 is both tablet and a notebook at the same time yet instead of being a dreadful failure it is in fact a brilliant little device.
Build and Design
Switch 10 is a convertible with a 10” ISP screen. Two parts – the tablet/screen and the keyboard are made of different materials – tablet is protected by Gorilla Glass at the front and has a brushed aluminum back whereas the keyboard is entirely made of plastic and is very light which may seem like it’s flimsy.
That is not the case though. There is nothing in it (apart from 500GB 2.5” HDD in some versions) so it can hardly feel substantial and with a price-tag attached to Switch 10, one can hardly expect the device to be made out of aluminum.
What may make the keyboard look worse is not the keyboard itself but the tablet part – the contrast between Gorilla Glass and aluminum on the tablet part and plastic of the keyboard is noticeable yet it does not translate into any quality issues.
Unlike Asus Transformer, Aspire Switch 10 uses to magnets to connect keyboard to the tablet. Magnets are so strong that one can pick up the device by the screen and keyboard will not separate.
I did not try to shake the keyboard off – I’m sure that can be done but it would have to be deliberate- moving the device by the screen is safe and pretty convenient at times.
The device weighs in at 1kg with PSU adding another 70 g. Most of that weight is in the tablet part but it doesn’t make it unsteady or prone to falling over.
Ports and features
The only port in the keyboard is a full size USB 2.0 port in the keyboard (right side). The rest of the ports are in the tablet.
On the left we have microSD card (SDHX cards work fine), mini-HDMI, Mini-USB and power jack. ON the right – audio in/out port and three physical buttons – power button (with a small diode inside indicating charging), volume rocker and windows button.
Current generation of Switch 10 (SW-12) uses a physical Windows on the side rather than a touch button under the screen that was used in SW-11. Touch button of SW-11 was troublesome and refused to work or worked on its own. Physical button doesn’t cause any problems and contrary to what you might think – its placement is not a problem. I never once used it in a month I own the device – there’s simply no need.
There is no Ethernet port and USB port is only 2.0 which is a serious limitation. Both SD card reader and 500GB HDD in the keyboard are bridged through USB so both are limited at roughly 20-23MB/s.
That is in spite of the fact that Bay Trail atoms support USB 3.0 and 500GB HDD is shown to be bridged by SATA-to-USB3.0 bridge. The reason for this decision is beyond me – especially that Acer’s main competitor Asus Transformer offers USB 3.0 and so do Acer’s own Switch 11.
Networking
Switch 10 SW-11 offered two Wi-Fi cards – both being dual stream (300mbps) And updated version – Switch 10 SW-12 has a downgraded card – Realtek RTL8723BS paired with Realtek’s own Bluetooth device.
Realtek RTL8723BS is capable of a theoretical connection speed of 150mbps on 2.4GHz band only. It works as good as you would expect a 150mbps card to work – average transfers of up to 30-35mbps are possible but that’s it.
A 300mbps Wi-Fi supporting 5GHz band would be a good choice here – in a device with only a USB 2.0 port and no Ethernet, Wi-Fi is the only convenient way to transfer large amounts of data.
Dual stream (not to be confused with dual-band) 300mbps connection would offer transfers of up to 10-12MB/s (megabytes) as opposed to 4-5MB/s that Realtek’s single stream card offers.
Single stream 802.11ac card seems like a worthy update too – up to 433mbps of theoretical connection speed would offer a practical throughput of up to 15-18MB/s.
Touchpad and Keyboard
As ridiculous as it might sound the keyboard is actually very good. Given its size it simply can’t be as comfortable as a full size keyboard but it’s by far the best small keyboard I’ve ever tested. It blows out netbooks out of the water and it considerably better than they keyboards used in Lenovo Miix 2 and in Asus Transformer.
Keys have a peculiar feel – a bit like the resistance you encounter increases the more you push the key until it stops fully. It’s very hard to describe but that feel coupled with key travel that is far greater than I expected makes for quite comfortable writing.
Touchpad is made by Synaptics and has integrated keys at the bottom. It’s smooth and works well. Windows uses generic drivers and since there is no Synaptic app installed by default scrolling doesn’t work. I assume you can install Synaptics suite and enable it but I hardly see a reason to do so, considering a touch screen is inches away…
Speakers and screen
There are several versions of this device – older one SW-11 had 1366x768 screens while SW-12 offers either 1280x800 or 1920x1200 Full HD one.
The one reviewed here has a Full HD IPS AUO17D8 screen with 10 point touch detection (not 5 point as most review mention). The screen is extremely bright (according to notebookcheck average brightness is 407.1 cd/m²) and backlight is very even. On my screen there is some back-light bleed in the bottom left corner – nothing significant but one would not expect something like that from such a good screen.
Contrast is – again according to notebookcheck 777:1 which is not the greatest but it has to be mentioned that contrast is always measured with top brightness so the brighter the screen the harder it is to achieve very high contrast, therefore it can hardly be considered a bad score.
Additionly – there is a Synaptics digitizer integrated in the screen Acer does not mention that anywhere is its promotional materials which is a bit odd but it is there (although only in FHD version).
You will need an Acer Active Stylus or a Dell Active Stylus (it’s the same sort of digitizer that Dell used in Venue 8 pro).
There are two speakers at the bottom of the tablet part. Sound is clear, loud and quite good. Basses do sound reasonable – it’s not painful to listen to music or watch a movie on this device.
Since the speakers are aimed at the user and spaced out and you would presumably be quite close to the device while watching a movie or listening to music it’s actually a proper stereo sound and it’s not muffled in any way.
Performance
Performance – there is some of that. Luckily Atoms of today have nothing to do with single core piles of misery that were offered in first netbooks.
Acer used Intel Atom Z3745D in SW5-11 and that upgraded it (by actually downgrading it) to Intel Atom Z3735F in SW5-12. Both SoCs are pretty much identical as far as CPU is concerned but Atom Z3745D has a higher clocked graphics core, and is off course more expensive.
There would be no difference in performance whatsoever in anything but the graphics is Acer decided to stick to dual channel RAM on SW5-12 too. Instead SW5-12 has single channel RAM (although the same amount of it – 2GB) as SW5-11. That makes the updated version slightly slower.
This is largely compensated by an eMMC drive used in SW5-12. With a linear read speed of over 160MB/s and linear write of over 80MB/s it’s significantly faster in real life applications than a previous mode (SW5-11 was 140/45) or competition (Asus Transformer T100 110/45; Lenovo Miix 2 75/30).
In real life usage a significant upgrade of eMMC dive speed coupled with the same basic Atom core will make Acer Switch 10 SW5-12 feel faster than its competitors or a previous model, even if benchmarks won’t show it directly.
Below you’ll find some basic tests – PC Mark 7 and WinRAR benchmark. Please ignore the Core i7 5960X shown in PC Mark 7 – I should have updated Sys Info before running it so it should properly detect the CPU. I did not but that had no effect on the score.
2GB of RAM is enough – it doesn’t sound like it but it is. There is not much bloatware to begin with but if you get rid of it and install a third party firewall and antivirus you’ll end up with 0.7GB RAM used at boot.
1.3GB of free RAM might not sound like much but is for the tasks you can complete on this device. Surely you were not planning on running VMs, playing Far Cry 4 or editing in Photoshop, were you?
Storage
eMMC drive (made by Hynix) comes in two flavors - 32GB and 64GB. Just buy the 64GB one. If you go for the 32GB – like I did – you’ll end up with 17GB free at first and then you’ll update windows, install Office and you’ll have more like 7-8GB at your disposal.
I bought a 64GB SDXC card, created a virtual volume and used a script to mount it as a local drive at every boot (so it’s not seen by Windows as a removable device). This works great as storage for music and documents but as mentioned before – it is limited by the fact that the card reader is bridged via USB 2.0.
Some versions of this device also come with an optional 500GB HDD in the keyboard part. This can’t be retrofitted to devices that came without it (the interior looks slightly different) so choose wisely. If you decide to buy one without the HDD you are stuck with it.
Please note that the HDD is also bridged via USB 2.0 so it’s limited to 20-30MB/s therefore there is no point replacing it with SSD. Still it’s good for storage so it’s worth having.
Heat and cooling
What heat? What cooling? SDP (Scenario Design Power) of Atom Z3735Fis 2.2W. There’s hardly anything to cool there.
When the device is being used on battery the screen brightness is at the lowest setting the power draw of the whole device in reader mode is 1.7 to 1.8W. That is if you are on a website reading or reading a PDF or ePub the whole device (let alone the CPU itself) uses about 1.7-1.8W.
As you would expect Acer Switch 10 barely gets warm.
According to notebookcheck under load it can draw up to 11W although roughly half it this seems to be needed by the screen back-light
Battery time
Acer Switch 10 is nowhere near what Asus Transformer offers. According to notebookcheck the latter can run on battery for almost 11 hours.
Acer switch 10 is nowhere near that figure – notebookcheck measured 7 hours 33 minutes in their test.
My real world stats seem to be a bit better – I’m closer to 8 hours but I always use the screen at lowest brightness when running on battery . See the attached report generated by Windows 8.1 for average battery run based on my actual usage pattern.
Something to remember – with a device that uses so little power small things have great effect on battery life. For example as it turns out using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer no only resulted in a lot more RAM used (and weirdly lagging flash movies, which doesn’t happen in IE) but also significantly more battery drain.
An example – assuming you’ve chosen Firefox instead of IE and FF puts more load on CPU – your power usage jumped up from 1.7W to 1.9W. This might sound insignificant but that id 11.7% which means your battery life should decrease by 11.7%. Using notebookcheck numbers - 7 hours 33 minutes is 453 minutes. 11.7% of 453 is 53 minutes.
Congratulations, you’ve just lost almost an hour of battery life.
Similarly having the keyboard part connected increases battery drain by a measly 0.3W (keyboard and USB board inside have to be powered) – again that would be 1 hour and 29 minutes lost.
Combine the two and you are almost two and a half hours down.
It’s not meant to be a put-down - this is how it works in every device of that type but it’s worth knowing that since that makes a significant difference. Tiny things add up to hours of battery time lost or gained – something you wouldn’t see in normal notebooks.
It’s also worth mentioning that the device has its own dedicated charger and can’t be charged via a micro-USB port. In part that is because output of the charger is 18W which is more than you can typically get out of a USB charger (it would have to be 5V and 3.6A)
Final Words
Having owned Acer Switch 10 for over a month I have to say it is a superb device. The build quality of the tablet part, the screen, the performance, very good keyboard – all of that sums up to a very nice user experience.
I wish Acer haven’s skipped on USB 3.0 port and I see no reason (apart from cost saving) why anyone would use a single stream Wi-Fi card these days. Other than that I have no complaints whatsoever.
It has to be said that it is not the cheapest device – Acer Aspire Switch 10 FHD with 32GB eMMC drive and 500GB HDD costs 25% more than Lenovo Miix2 with 64GB eMMC and FHD screen.
That said Acer has better keyboard, faster eMMC drive, better screen, pretty much the same battery life (if anything slightly better) 500GB HDD for storage and crucially it is a notebook until you decide otherwise. Lenovo Miix2 has just one screen angle –it’s not technically a convertible laptop, it’s more of a tablet stand. In my opinion Acer wins that comparison and I did put my money where my mouth is.
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Excellent review, thanks. You actually convinced me to buy the device myself, you should be in sales
I got the 32GB+HDD FHD version. Its a very nice device, overall everything I have to say about it is already covered by the review. So far the only negative thing I find on it is...Windows 8. I've never used W8 and so far I really hate it. Full screen apps, liveid login etc. ughh.
You didn't mention it but the device comes with Office 365 Home Premium(mine did anyway, maybe its optional?). Though it says its a "1-year free subscription", does that mean I have a 1-year license for the software or is it 1 year only for the online storage? -
Thanks for the heads up.
You know I'm starting to think that this laptop is either the best in the world and nobody have any trouble with it - hence no posts here - or we're the only people dumb enough to buy it. What do you think?
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It's curious indeed since ASUS Transformer was rather popular and Switch 10 had some significant improvements over it, so one would expect it to do well too.
I would prefer Switch 10 to be the best in the world but I'm afraid it's far more likely that we are dumb
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Hello @ATG, the only person reading this thread
Acer released another BIOS update - BIOS 1.18 introduces support for Windows 10 BIOS capsule update.
I haven't flashed it since I'm not using Windows 10 on my Switch 10. -
I started having issues with the clickpad not responding to right clicks like it should. I thought I might have used it way too extensively for such a machine and have worn it out.
While it's still covered by warranty I had no intention of sending it away and instead I looked for an eBay opportunity and sure enough I found one. A complete bottom part with French keyboard (which looked all the same to me until after I've bought it and discovered that few keys are somewhere else than you'd expect) for the same money you can buy a new touch pad for Switch 10 - some $27.
I bought it at that price and once I've received it I discovered, not only is it almost new (you can feel it) but that it contains a 500GB HDD in it which was not advertised (I doubt the seller knew it was there). The HDD itself sells for $37-45 so I made an even better deal than I thought.
You can't replace the keyboard easily since it's attached to the plastic part rather permanently.
Either way I did replace the touchpad and the new one works flawlessly. The old one is in the spare french unit which will enter service if needed. And the 500GB drive inside the new unit has "Power On Time" of 1 hour
I'm pleased with how I spent my $27...ALLurGroceries and ATG like this.
Acer Switch 10 Full HD Review
Discussion in 'Acer' started by downloads, Feb 3, 2015.
