Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14, First Take: Windows 10 on a shoestring

With a price tag of just £150, the Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14 is an eye-catching prospect if you're on a tight budget. But can you really use this Windows 10 laptop for everyday workloads without running into any issues?

Plenty of compromises that have been made to achieve the bargain-basement price point. The processor, for example, is a dual-core, 1.6-2.16GHz Intel Celeron N3050 with 2GB of RAM in support. Right away, the CPU/RAM combination, and integrated HD Graphics, will limit your ambitions for this laptop.

Then there's the paltry allocation of 32GB of SSD storage. With Windows 10 Home configured, there was just 12.9GB free, which won't be enough to install many third-party apps. And if you want to store lots of photos, music or videos, then look away or factor in external storage.

To be fair, Acer makes no bones about the minimal storage -- the 'Cloudbook' name is a heavy hint that you're expected to keep most of your data off-device. Acer bundles 1TB of OneDrive storage, plus a year's subscription to Office 365 Personal -- and of course there's nothing to stop you setting up other cloud accounts as well.

The screen and keyboard are vital components of laptop usability, but the 14-inch 1,366-by-768-pixel TFT panel is disappointing. Brightness doesn't go all that high, viewing angles are poor (especially on the vertical plane) and colours are washed out. The screen's matte finish is welcome, but if you're a fan of video viewing, or you need a vibrant, bright display for other reasons, look elsewhere. Video streamed from YouTube was pallid and disappointing.

Sound quality is pretty poor too: there's plenty of volume, but bass tones are largely absent. Music and video fans should steer clear.

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The keyboard is better, with a fair amount of travel in the keys, which are well spaced. We found typing quite comfortable. The touchpad is generously sized and equally responsive.

Battery life is also pretty good. Acer claims up to 12 hours and my anecdotal findings, based on using the Cloudbook 14 for a couple of days, suggest that if you restrict yourself to web browsing and document creation/editing, you should get a full day's work from the system on battery power.

The chassis is obviously plastic, and there's considerable flex in the lid section -- this budget laptop won't stand up well to rough handling. It's reasonably portable though, weighing 1.6kg and measuring 33.94cm wide by 23.49cm deep by 1.79cm thick.

It is nice to see a full-sized HDMI port, and there are two USB ports -- one USB 3.0, the other USB 2.0. There's also a headset jack. An SD card slot allows you to expand on that minimal internal storage: you can get a 32GB MicroSD card with SD caddy for less than £10, 64GB costs less than £20 and you can really blow out with a 128GB card for under £50 -- and these are by no means the lowest prices around.

It's unfortunate that the SD card doesn't fit completely into its slot: about a fifth of it protrudes from the edge of the laptop, making it difficult to leave a card in situ as a permanent addition to the internal storage.

You'll have to make some compromises with the Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14 -- notably on internal storage, screen quality, processing power and build quality. If you can live with these, enjoy the bargain-basement price.

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