Acer V5-171 review: Acer V5-171

So, here's the situation: I walk up to you at a coffee shop and put an 11-inch laptop on the table. It's compact. It looks like a Netbook. I tell you it has a Core i5 processor, a 500GB hard drive, 6GB of RAM. Then I tell you it's $550. You're interested, right? At that price, why wouldn't you be? (Acer also says the Aspire V5 will initially be available for $500 through a limited-time Facebook promotion.)

7.7

Acer V5-171

The Good

An excellent set of specs and features in the <b>Acer Aspire V5-171-6867</b> include a Core i5 processor, 6GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, HDMI, USB 3.0, and even Bluetooth, all for a surprisingly low price, and stuffed into a very small Netbook-like body.

The Bad

It has a cramped-feeling keyboard and touch pad, weak battery life, and poor speakers, plus an uninspired, thick design.

The Bottom Line

The Acer Aspire V5-171-6867 crams the horsepower of a full-fledged budget ultrabook into an 11-inch ultraportable, for several hundred dollars less than most equivalent products. It's a great budget laptop to consider, but sacrifices have been made to shrink down that much computer into a tiny package.

The Acer Aspire V5-171-6867 is a "Wait until I tell you the price" laptop. I call it that because, until that price floats past your ears, the V5 is just another unattractive little plastic gadget, a laptop that seems at first to be lost in a time warp from the days of Netbooks and before iPads. Our expectations for what a portable gadget can look like have changed, the bar has been raised -- but, pure performance and price are areas where a computer like the Acer can still shine.

Remember the Acer Aspire Timeline X 1830T? This is the successor to that 11-inch laptop, an ultraportable that compared extremely favorably at the time to Apple's 11-inch MacBook Air. This new Aspire V5 has the same appeal; after all, it shares the specs of full-blown 13-inch ultrabook. The hard-drive space matches what you'd see on a regular mainstream computer. Yes, there's an Ethernet jack; yes, there are HDMI and USB 3.0 ports. You're getting a no-compromise machine under the hood, at more than $100 (maybe $200) less than any equivalent ultrabook costs. Compared with the 11-inch MacBook Air at $999, the Acer Aspire V5-171-6867 literally costs half as much.

There are drawbacks, of course. The keyboard feels cramped because of a narrow palm rest; the touch pad is small; the larger 500GB hard drive isn't a fast solid-state drive (although, compared with the puny 64GB of space on the entry-level MacBook Air, you're getting a king's ransom of space), and the internal speakers are terrible. The biggest letdown might be battery life: the Aspire V5-171-6867 lasted only 3 hours and 49 minutes in our video playback test, while the Timeline X 1830T I reviewed two years ago -- the V5's predecessor in spirit -- ran for more than an hour longer.

However, if you want a power ultraportable that gives you all the performance you're looking for from a mainstream laptop at a fraction of the size and price, the Acer Aspire V5 is unbeatable. You just have to live with a lot of hand cramping and maybe some squinting. Many people might simply prefer to either go with an iPad or a larger ultrabook instead.