Acer Swift 3 OLED review: a great package with one thing missing

The last Acer Swift 3 I reviewed was an affordable AMD-powered student laptop. It was fine overall, but didn’t stand out in any particular area.

The new Acer Swift 3 is not. This latest Swift 3 has two very notable features: an OLED screen and one of the most powerful mobile processors Alder Lake has to offer. Currently listed at $1,199, it’s an interesting combination of OLED and power, and surprisingly affordable. For those who might be interested in the M2 MacBook Air but want to stick with Windows, this is a potential strong contender.

Unfortunately, the short battery life severely limits your audience.

OLED displays have become affordable in the last few years. But as manufacturers continue to incorporate them into lower-end devices, we hope they keep power efficiency in mind. Not everyone needs all-day battery life, but it should be a luxury. I don’t mean that.

I hesitate to call the Swift 3 OLED a workstation. Because it has a more compact build than its category implies: it’s 0.7 inches thick and weighs 3.09 pounds. It’s nothing – it’s the same thickness as the traditionally clunky Aspire 5, and if my backpack gets pretty full (which is common with student backpacks), I’d rather have a thinner one But 14-inch devices are like the marginal space between heavy, premium devices like the 4-pound Razer Blade 14 and very thin portables like the 2.6-pound Swift 5. , so it’s fairly lightweight.

Most of the chassis is pretty low-profile, with the standard silver color and plastic-thin bezels. The lid is glossy and reflects the light from above. The biggest compromise for this chassis is the build. The palm rest has a plastic feel to it and there’s a fair amount of flex throughout the chassis that really made me nervous to put things on it, in other words a slightly creaky chassis at a very attractive price He is one of the classic mid-range Acer offerings.

The touchpad was another minor quibble. The force required to push it down is very stiff, and I wish it was closer to the Swift 5’s touchpad that I loved.

But the highlight of the Swift 3’s chassis is the display. With a 16:10 aspect ratio, 400 nits brightness, and 2880 x 1800 resolution, this is an absolute delight. There’s plenty of room for multitasking, plenty of brightness at any setting, and the images you get are sharp and vibrant. This is definitely one of the best displays you can get for a Windows laptop at this price point. It actually has a higher native resolution than the M2 MacBook Air, which costs at least $600 more in a comparable configuration. It doesn’t have a touchscreen — which is fair since it’s a clamshell laptop, but it might not be appealing to students who need to draw graphs and the like.

The keyboard is another standout feature. Not only is it fairly rigid, but it has an incredibly springy click that feels like you’re typing at lightning speed. It was one and blew my normal typing speed away. There is a moderate click feeling and a crisp feeling. The silvery keys and greyish letters don’t provide much contrast, especially in low backlighting, so they may not be the best choice for those with visual impairments. If so, there’s also quite a bit of backlight bleed (I’m not that kind of person myself).

The fingerprint sensor that was under the arrow keys on the previous model has been integrated into the power button in the upper right corner of the keyboard. I think this makes the overall aesthetic of the deck more even, but the flat shape makes it a little harder to miss if you’re not looking, and we didn’t get the fingerprints 100% of the time.

Looking under the hood, if you’re realistic about what to expect from a 14-inch Intel device and the thermal limitations that come with it, I don’t think you’ll have any performance issues with this laptop. Our test configuration is currently $1,199.99 and includes a Core i7-12700H with Iris Xe graphics, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB of SSD storage. An $899 Core i5-12500H model is also listed. This might be more valuable for those who don’t need every last ounce of performance. However, this model only has 8 GB of RAM. Anyone interested in gaming or professional work is advised to purchase at least 16. The storage is also 512 GB instead of 1 TB.

Swift OLED is the type of device expected to feature P-series processors. This chip is found in devices such as the Swift 5 and the Dell XPS 13 Plus. It consumes less power than the H series, making it (at least in theory) more suitable for ultraportable machines. Interestingly, however, the Swift 3 OLED has an H-series chip instead.

The application loaded quickly and performance was certainly fast. I was able to retouch photos without a hitch, with lots of Chrome tabs open and music streaming in the background. There is a silent mode built into the installation program that you can turn on if you want to shut down.

(As for those pre-installed programs, in typical Acer fashion, this device came with a ton of crap. Dropbox, antivirus, etc. I went through and uninstalled everything, but It wasn’t the end of the world, register as an official bitch.)

Of course, the downside of such a large processor is that it’s not efficient at all. I averaged 3.5-4 hours of continuous use with this device at around 200 nits of brightness. This was due to my own fairly light workload of Chrome tabs, Google Meet calls, etc. For example, when working in Premiere, lifespan is even more negligible.

Now, nobody expects an H-series processor with a high-resolution screen to last all day, but this isn’t even the gigantic gaming laptop we’re talking about. Being a portable device, part of its appeal is supposed to be the fact that you can take it with you wherever you go. If you’re buying a workstation just to keep it on your desk all day, is 14″ really the best choice?

Here’s the case for the Acer Swift 3: This is one of the most powerful laptops and one of the best screens you can get in the $1,200 range. The portable build makes it perfect for both multimedia viewing and demanding work on the go. This can be a very unique and effective device. With an absolutely audience of powerful 14-inch laptops with great screens, it’s a shame how much the poor battery life undercuts that case.

We understand that some shoppers (even those who shop in the 14-inch category) don’t care about battery life. That doesn’t mean companies can afford to ask buyers to make such big compromises. We don’t entirely blame Acer for this as it has been a consistent issue with Intel devices for the past year. But it’s a bad result among these offerings, and the corresponding extra power that the H-series chips bring to the P-series (which have the same architecture) isn’t as valuable for ultraportables as it is for larger workstations. Media creators accustomed to Windows can expect to greatly extend the life of all sorts of portable OLED devices (such as the Dell XPS 13 Plus and various members of Asus’ Zenbook line). No big compromises in performance.