Acer Aspire S5-371

Acer Aspire S5-371 - The Best Budget Ultra-portable Notebook?

The Acer Aspire S5-371, also known as the Acer Aspire S13, is a 13.3-inch ultra-portable notebook that at a small size and low weight, might just be the best Windows based device to carry with you every day.

First off, the S13’s main selling point, its small size and weight. At around 1.2 kilograms, it is one of the lightest notebooks I have ever seen at its price point of about $700 USD on Amazon, beating the similarly priced Dell Inspiron 13 5000 by 300 grams, a sizable amount. It even manages this low weight with minimal body flex, possibly due to its brushed aluminium palm rest.

This brings me to the physical appearance of the device. On the top, it is finished with a great looking grooved matte-black plastic, inset with a silver Acer logo. When the device is opened, it reveals a rather large, once again matte-black plastic finish this time without the grooves. This surrounds an amazing 13-inch 1080p IPS display, with a pixel density of about 160 PPI. While not quite Apples retina display, it still looks great.

Moving on down, we find the black brushed aluminium

palm rest I mentioned earlier, which absorbs a huge amount

of finger prints, an issue that can be easily avoided by using

sand-blasted aluminium, like on Apple’s Macbooks, rather

than the chosen brushed finish. Inside this an average sized

touch pad, which I noticed had a rather high friction surface.

Above the trackpad is a decent sized keyboard. It features

reasonable key travel, at 0.87mm, and typing is a great

experience, and I found myself loving the keyboard. The

keyboard is also backlit with blue-tinted white LEDs. The

device has very little noticeable body flex, unless you go

looking for it, giving it the feeling of being very sturdy.

On each side, the S13 features a good selection of IO. On the left, it has a USB 3.0 port, combination headphone and microphone jack, and an SD card reader. On the right, it features a charging port, HDMI, a second USB 3.0 port, and a USB Type-C port.

Onto the specs, the model of the S13 I have, has an Intel i5-6500u, 8GB RAM, and Intel HD 520 Graphics. Although it only has a dual-core CPU, it still performs great, and I noticed no system slowdown unless I really tried to give it hard time. It’s 8GBs of LPDDR3 RAM allow it to easily run multiple tasks at a time, and in the tried and true method of opening Chrome tabs till it slows down, it managed about 17, and even then didn’t slow down much. It can also run games at reasonable framerates, despite its lack of a dedicated graphics card, although it does struggle a bit at its native resolution of 1080p in some games, an issue easily solved by changing to a lower one.

The S13 also features a 256GB SSD, allowing it to boot up in only a few seconds, and programs open nearly instantly. The downside of this is that you do have to manage your storage, but if you clean up now and then, 256GB is plenty.

For battery life, the S13’s 4030 mAh battery gives it a great five to six hours on a single charge, providing you don’t run anything too demanding such as games. This is considerably less than Acer’s stated eleven hours, but still much better than anything I have every owned. However, it doesn’t do very well compared to other laptops in its category, such as the Apple MacBook Air, with its ten hours.

When using the device, the software ran smoothly, due to the reasonable hardware inside. My only issue is the large amount of bloatware, such as Amazon One-button, and Acer's replacement for the freaking power button. Other than that it was a great software experience.

The conclusion is that the Acer Aspire S13 is a great “budget-friendly” ultraportable notebook, with solid specs, a great build, and amazing general usability. The only real gripes I have, are the brushed aluminium finish, that is difficult to clean and absorbs fingerprints faster than a touchscreen, and the rather excessive bloatware pre-loaded. But with these my only real complaints, there is little stopping me from recommending that if you want a small and light notebook for regular travel, but need decent specs, then this is the laptop you should buy.