Acer Chromebook Spin 11: At First Glance
Chromebooks have long been a low-cost option to macOS and Windows laptops. So, if you’re looking for a laptop for around $500 or less, they’re a perfect place to start.
Acer’s Chromebook Spin 11, on the other hand, is a budget-friendly 2-in-1 convertible laptop. For a $234.92 starting price in September 2021, you get a laptop with an attractive design and Intel Celeron processor.
This makes it a perfect option for students. However, is this laptop capable of performing tasks other than school works?
Let’s find out!
Acer Chromebook Spin 11: Design, Dimension & Weight
Chromebooks rarely impress when it comes to design, but the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 turns the script around. With a beautiful, subtle silver cross-hairline design on top of a silk-textured plastic lid, the Spin 11 is pretty attractive.
Furthermore, the remainder of the laptop is made of plastic. However, don’t be fooled by its plastic build; this Chromebook is one of the most durable laptops I’ve reviewed.
I couldn’t get the laptop to flex even slightly, no matter how hard I tried. Even the screen wobbles a little only when I poke it hard enough.
Additionally, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 can withstand bumps, knocks, and scrapes, making it ideal for travelers. It’s a device that you can easily pick up and travel with.
I failed to note that the laptop’s lid has a Chrome logo on the upper left. Acer’s logo can also be found on the left side of the lid, but in the center.
The Acer Chromebook Spin 11 gets its name from its 11.6-inch IPS touchscreen display. This display features a screen resolution of HD (1366 x 768).
With an HD screen resolution, the laptop’s display isn’t super-sharp, but fairly colorful and vibrant. Moreover, you won’t be able to enjoy your favorite shows on Netflix or other streaming services in Full HD.
Furthermore, the screen recorded an average brightness of 213 nits. This brightness rating is significantly lower than the Chromebook average of 258 nits.
Additionally, it falls short of the 276 nits recorded by the VivoBook W202NA.
However, in terms of color accuracy, the laptop’s HD touchscreen display covers an impressive 82% of the color gamut. This percentage beats the Chromebook average of 77%.
Additionally, it also outperforms the Lenovo Flex 6 11 with a score of 71%. With these ratings and percentages, it is easier to say the Chromebook Spin 11’s screen is colorful but not bright.
Still, on the display, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11’s touchscreen is a 10-point screen. A 10-point screen is a touchscreen that can identify and respond to ten touch points at the same time.
To clarify, users will be able to perform multiple gestures on the laptop’s touchscreen using up to ten fingers. Moreover, the touchscreen is extremely precise and capable of tracking finger movement and commands with great accuracy.
Additionally, the touchscreen display is covered with Corning Gorilla Glass, which is meant to protect it from scratches and knocks. However, the display is bordered by rather thick bezels, which is to be expected at this price.
Moving on, the touchscreen can rotate 360 degrees, allowing you to use the laptop in different modes. The modes include laptop mode, tent mode, stand mode, and tablet mode.
Additionally, thanks to its outstanding hinges, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 transitions easily from laptop to tablet mode. This can be done by simply rotating the screen full 360 degrees until the lid touches the laptop’s bottom.
Using the laptop in tablet mode automatically disables the keyboard. This is a good thing because unintentionally pressing the keys is inevitable when holding the laptop as a tablet.
Interestingly, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 features a Wacom stylus for drawing or writing on the screen in Tablet mode. The bad news is that the stylus has no storage slot in the laptop.
Unfortunately, because there’s no storage slot for the stylus pen, it can easily be misplaced. However, the good news is that the battery-free pen is accurate, precise, and has good palm rejection.
Acer’s Chromebook Spin 11 will be more than enough if you need a laptop to type long essays. Specifically, the laptop features a full-size island-style keyboard with black keys and white letters on them.
Moreover, this keyboard is also spill-resistant, so it can resist a sudden splash of water. Furthermore, the keyboard’s keys are well-spaced and have a good amount of travel, making typing a pleasure.
Sitting below the keyboard is a touchpad that measures 104.14 x 58.42 mm. In addition to its size, this touchpad is very accurate and responsive, it can also perform multi-touch gestures.
However, clicking on its integrated click buttons is a pain, as they require a significant amount of force.
With the Acer Chromebook Spin 11, you get two webcams. One above the screen and the second centered above the keyboard.
These cameras are quite adequate for video calling, although you won’t see much in poor lighting conditions.
Moreover, the webcam located above the keyboard is primarily used while the laptop is in tablet mode. Therefore, when you wish to make a video call or take pictures, you won’t have to change the laptop’s mode.
In terms of connectivity, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 comes with a minimal amount of ports. On both sides of the laptop, there is a USB 3.0 port and a USB Type-C port.
Furthermore, the left side of the laptop also features a headphone/microphone jack. Also, on the right side, there’s a Kensington lock slot, which is a great inclusion for security-conscious users.
The bottom-mounted speakers on the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 won’t deliver the best audio quality for loud music or movies. They are, however, capable of performing most common tasks, such as holding full-room conference calls or watching Netflix.
Moving on, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 comes with a one-year International Traveler’s Warranty. The International Travelers Warranty covers products that malfunction under normal working conditions and offers repair.
Therefore, if you encounter any issue with the Chromebook Spin 11 during the warranty period, Acer will get it repaired.
Additionally, Acer offers extended warranties and service agreements beyond the standard one year. They also offer online chat help and a technical support line that is available 24/7.
Measuring 296 x 206 x 20.9 mm and weighing 1401.6 g, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 is quite light. Comparatively, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 is lighter than the Samsung Chromebook 4.
In particular, the Samsung Chromebook 4 measures 359.66 x 244.86 x 16.51 mm and weighs 1600 g.
In conclusion, for a laptop this cheap, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11’s design and build quality are pretty impressive. However, it has some downsides such as its thick bezels and the limited amount of ports.
Notwithstanding, I still believe the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 deserves an eight in this design review section.
Acer Chromebook Spin 11: Processor (CPU) Performance
The Acer Chromebook Spin 11 comes with a dual-core Intel Celeron N3350 processor with a cache of 2 MB. This processor runs at a base frequency of 1.10 GHz.
However, the processor can clock to a maximum frequency of 2.40 GHz.
Additionally, the Intel Celeron N3350 is a low-end entry-level processor mostly found in affordable laptops. Therefore, the processor is limited to performing basic tasks such as web browsing, and word processing.
Unfortunately, with this processor, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 performed quite poorly in a Geekbench 3 test. Geekbench 3 test is a synthetic benchmark test that measures the overall performance of a computer.
On this test, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 scored 1,483 points. This score is way below one of its closest rivals, the Asus VivoBook W202NA’s score of 2774 points.
Additionally, it falls short of the Lenovo Flex 6 11’s score of 3,196 points. It is important to mention that the Lenovo Flex 6 11 uses an Intel Celeron N4000 processor.
The Asus VivoBook W202NA, on the other hand, uses the same processor as the Acer Chromebook Spin 11.
In conclusion, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11’s processor can only perform simple tasks. Asides from that, it performed poorly on a benchmark test that I conducted.
I will be rating the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 a seven in this processor review for its not-so-good processor performance.
Acer Chromebook Spin 11: Memory (RAM) Performance
In terms of memory, Acer’s Chromebook Spin 11 comes with a single LPDDR4 slot with a standard memory of 4GB. This memory cannot be upgraded because 4 GB is also the maximum memory supported on the laptop.
Besides that, the memory is soldered to the motherboard. However, even with 4 GB RAM, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 was able to multitask modestly.
To test its multitasking abilities, I launched an android game called Cover fire and about 10 tabs on Chrome browser. Moreover, three of those Chrome tabs were streaming an HD video on Youtube.
Impressively, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 performed smoothly while playing the game and running the Chrome tabs simultaneously. However, the laptop began to lag when I tried working on a document on MS Word.
The laptop’s performance became even worse when I started switching in-between the Chrome tabs and the game. After testing the multitasking capabilities of the laptop, I performed a Jetstream test to further determine its performance.
Jetstream is a JavaScript and Web Assembly benchmark test that measures the web browsing performance of a computer. On the Jetstream test, Acer’s Chromebook Spin 11 scored 53.03 points.
The score of Acer’s Chromebook Spin 11 is significantly below the 67 points category average. However, the laptop’s score closely matches the 54.54 points received by the Dell Chromebook 5190.
In conclusion, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 is quite productive with its 4 GB RAM. However, 4 GB of RAM is fairly inadequate and won’t be sufficient for most users.
Therefore, I will be rating the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 a seven out of ten in this memory performance review.
Acer Chromebook Spin 11: Storage Options & Performance
For storage, the Chromebook Spin 11 comes with 32 GB of eMMC flash storage. Moreover, this storage type isn’t fast as SSDs found on Windows or macOS laptops.
It is, nevertheless, fast enough for Chrome OS laptops. Therefore, opening files on the storage was really swift, and sending files from the storage was also fast.
However, 32 GB of storage is relatively limited. Nowadays, most smartphones come with 64 GB or 126 GB of storage.
If you are a storage-hungry user, though, you won’t have to worry about running out of space.
This is because, just like most Chromebooks, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 features 100GB Google Drive cloud storage. In addition to that, this cloud storage is free for two years.
Finally, I will be rating the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 an eight in this storage review section. This rating is due to the fact that it features a free 100 GB Google Drive cloud storage.
Acer Chromebook Spin 11: Graphic Card Performance
In terms of graphics, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 comes with an Intel HD Graphics 500. As expected, this graphics is an integrated graphics card.
So, it isn’t powerful enough for running graphic-demanding apps or games. Unlike discrete graphics cards, the Intel HD Graphics 500 doesn’t feature a dedicated VRAM.
This implies that the graphics card shares the same memory as the CPU.
Furthermore, the Intel HD Graphics 500 features a 200 MHz base GPU frequency and a 650 MHz boost GPU frequency. With this graphics card, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 won’t be able to play high-end games or perform well graphically.
This isn’t a major concern, though, considering that this is a budget laptop, so you can’t get everything. However, it is more than capable of playing most android games downloaded from Google Play Store.
For example, while playing Cover Fire which I download from Play Store, the laptop performed smoothly without any lag.
Interestingly, with this same graphics card, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 performed pretty well on a WebGL Aquarium test. WebGL Aquarium is a web-based benchmark that measures how well a computer can render 3D graphics in a fish-in-a-pond-like scenario.
On this WebGL Aquarium test, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 rendered 500 fish at an average frame rate of 40fps. This frame rate is identical to that of the Dell Chromebook 5190, which has an Intel HD Graphics 620.
Moving on, I also conducted a real-world gaming test to further determine the performance of the Spin 11’s graphics card. On this test, I played World of Warcraft, in which the laptop delivered an average frame rate of 46 fps.
Even though the game is a low-end game, this frame rate is quite impressive for an integrated graphics card. However, high-end games such as Far Cry 5 are totally unplayable on the laptop.
In conclusion, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11’s graphics performance isn’t really great. However, it isn’t poor either.
Therefore, I will rate the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 a seven in this graphics card review.
Acer Chromebook Spin 11: Battery Life & Performance
When it comes to battery, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 makes use of a 2-cell Lithium-ion 4870 mAh battery. As advertised by Acer, this laptop’s battery should last up to 10 hours.
I couldn’t believe Acer’s claim about the battery, so I performed a battery test on the laptop. This battery test involves adjusting the laptop’s brightness to medium, then continuously surfing the internet using a WIFI network.
At the end of this battery test, the Chromebook lasted 8 hours and 41 minutes. Unfortunately, this battery runtime is less than the category average of 9 hours and 49 minutes.
However, it came close to the runtime achieved by the ASUS VivoBook W202NA. On the same battery test, the ASUS VivoBook W202NA lasted 8 hours and 43 minutes.
In conclusion, 8 hours of battery life is quite impressive for a laptop in this price range. However, you could get other low-cost laptops with longer battery life.
Notwithstanding, the Acer Chromebook Spin 11’s battery life is pretty impressive. Therefore, I will rate the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 an eight in this battery review section.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Acer Chromebook Spin 11 is a decent budget-friendly 2-in-1 convertible laptop suitable for students and frequent travelers.
Yes. The Acer Chromebook Spin 11 is a 2-in-1 convertible laptop. Therefore, it features a touchscreen display. The Chromebook also comes with a stylus pen.
Yes, you can. You can download the Microsoft Office Word application from the Google Play Store.
The Acer Chromebook Spin 11 has a starting price of $234.92 in September 2021, when this review was written.
No, it doesn’t.
Conclusion
Acer’s Chromebook Spin 11 is the perfect combination of low-price, lightweight design, and decent hardware for basic computing activities. Furthermore, this laptop is a convertible laptop, which means it can also be used as a tablet.
However, as one would expect from a low-cost laptop, this laptop has some drawbacks. Some of its drawbacks include a small number of ports, thick bezels, and a maximum RAM of 4 GB.
Furthermore, I wouldn’t recommend the Acer Chromebook Spin 11 as your main laptop. This is because it is only capable of performing basic tasks such as web browsing and word processing.
However, it is a suitable choice for a student who is on a budget. It is also suitable for travelers due to its lightweight.
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