Acer Switch Alpha 12 review

ACER SWITCH ALPHA 12 – DESIGN AND BUILD

2016 has seen an influx of Surface Pro rivals. The majority of them are cut-down copies of Microsoft’s convertible and their only real selling point is a moderately reduced price tag. At first glance the Switch Alpha does little to change this trend.

The boxy all-metal tablet section’s silver-grey finish hardly exudes the same class you'd get from a Surface Pro. The attachable keyboard is also almost identical to a Surface Type Cover, which is a good thing.

This all may make the Switch Alpha 12 sound a little dull, but up close I noticed a few design changes that fix some of the Surface’s niggling flaws.

For starters the keyboard cover has a loop for the Switch Alpha 12’s optional stylus to fit into. This sounds small, but considering the hefty £40-plus that most active styluses cost, the loop’s presence is a serious bonus that makes it harder to misplace the pen.

The addition of a USB 3.1 port that can be used to power devices, transfer files or attach the device to an external monitor is another nice bonus. The accompanying full-sized USB 3.0 port makes the Switch Alpha 12 significantly better connected than many competing convertibles, which only have single USB-C ports, like the Huawei Matebook and Samsung Galaxy TabPro S.

I’m also a fan of the Acer’s take on the Surface’s kickstand. The stand disconnects from the back and can be used to sit the device at a variety of angles. Many rivals only allow for two or three sitting angles, so this is a great ddition. It also has a grippy rubber bottom, which helps stop it sliding or moving when you’re using the Switch Alpha 12 on your lap.

Build quality is solid. After a week and a half lugging the Switch Alpha 12 in my satchel around London, the device remained scratch- and chip-free.

The Acer Switch Alpha 12’s configuration options are also generally in line with the Surface’s, outside of the use of an Intel Core i3, rather than a Core M CPU in its cheapest specification. Buyers can choose to load the device with a sixth-gen Intel Core i3, i5 or i7 U-series CPU and 4-8GB of DDR3 memory.

The lack of a 1TB storage option is a bigger issue for me. Acer’s only offering the Switch Alpha 12 with 128-512GB of SSD storage. This won’t be a problem for most people, but it will be an problem for people with large media libraries, or designers looking for a mobile touch-up station. I reviewed the basic Core i3 version with 128GB of storage and 4GB of RAM.

ACER SWITCH ALPHA 12 – KEYBOARD AND TOUCHPAD

My only qualms with the Switch Alpha 12’s design stem from its slightly lacklustre keyboard dock.

First, the good: the backlit keyboard section is better than average. The keys aren’t as tactile nor as pleasant to type on as a proper laptop’s keyboard, but they’re miles better than the MateBook and Galaxy TabPro S’s attachable covers. Keys feel reactive and have reasonable travel, too. They’re also nicely spaced out, which makes it easier to comfortably type without making constant mistakes.

I’m less enamoured of the touchpad. The pad’s palm detection works well and it has a nice smooth finish. But the device features a horrid all-in-one design where the discrete right- and left-click buttons integrate into the main pad. This makes it all too easy to have the pointer go flying off your intended target when you try to click and drag.

Sensitivity for basic tasks is fine and the pad feels reactive, but its multi-touch abilities aren’t up to scratch. The touchpad struggles to recognise basic tasks like scrolling up and down using two fingers. All too often the pad wouldn’t recognise my commands, and would then inexplicably jump into action and enact every instruction I’d given it. The problem was intermittent but fairly annoying and would regularly cause chaos on spreadsheets or text files I was editing.

ACER SWITCH ALPHA 12 – SCREEN

The Acer Switch Alpha 12’s 12-inch screen features some impressive specifications, on paper at least. The 2,160 x 1,440 resolution easily matches its key rivals, including the Surface Pro 4, and ensures text and icons are uniformly sharp.

To the naked eye colours are also solid and, thanks to the use of IPS screen tech, whites are nice and clean. I didn’t notice severe backlight bleed either. If all you want to do is watch Netflx, browse the web or doodle a few quick notes in OneNote, the screen is more than up to scratch.

However, more in-depth testing with a colorimeter revealed a few issues with the display that will put off some buyers. The 456.7nits max brightness is very bright, but the 0.56 black level gives it a distinctly average 795:1 contrast ratio. The 8,712k colour temperature is also well above the 6,500k ideal.

The screen’s 81.3% coverage of the sRGB colour gamut is OK for regular use, but its 57.8% coverage of the Adobe RGB is disappointing.

For regular folks who just want a tablet to watch Netflix, or a laptop to web browse, these figures won’t be a problem. The Adobe RGB coverage will, however, be a serious negative for professional artists and designers looking to take advantage of the Aspire’s stylus.

The inaccurate colours make the tablet a poor choice for editing photos or digital painting. A few years ago this would've been fine, but since the arrival of stellar tablets like the Galaxy TabPro S, there are better convertibles available for artists.

ACER SWITCH ALPHA 12 – AUDIO

Hybrid devices generally offer pretty poor audio quality. The thin dimensions and focus on portability mean they always come loaded with tiny, generally underpowered speakers. This remains true on the Switch Alpha 12. The tablet section’s speaker is good enough for Netflix watching in bed, but it's underpowered for pretty much everything else.

Maximum volume levels aren’t as high as the Surface Pro 4’s and rapidly become tinny when you try to play music on them. Being fair to Acer, though, they’re no worse than on most other Windows tablets and this is an issue I’ve encountered on close to all of the hybrids I’ve tested.

ACER SWITCH ALPHA 12 – PERFORMANCE

I reviewed the cheapest Intel Core i3 configuration of the Switch Alpha 12 with 4GB of RAM. This makes direct comparisons with other convertibles I’ve tested slightly tricky, as the Surface Pro 4 I reviewed had a Core i5 configuration and the Huawei Matebook and Galaxy TabPro S units we've tested ran using lower-power M chips.

The i3 model performed moderately better than the ultra-low-power Intel Core M devices during my synthetic benchmark tests.

On the generalist Geekbench 3 benchmark, which gives a rough gauge of a device’s overall performance, the Switch Alpha 12 ran in with 2,662 single-core and 5,449 multi-core scores, which put it above competing Core M-powered devices. The MateBook ran in with 2,250 single-core and 4,254 multi-core scores on the same test.

The Switch Alpha 12’s lead continued on the PCMark Home test, where it scored 2,369, offering a slight performance boost on the Matebook, which scored 2,074.

Intel HD graphics aren’t suitable for even moderately demanding gaming, but the Switch Alpha 12 managed to run Minecraft at a playable framerate during my tests.

The Switch Alpha 12 also performed admirably during my digital painting sessions. Despite the screen’s poor colour gamut coverage, the stylus is pretty good. The palm-detection tech isn’t the best around, but it’s good enough for basic sketching and I didn’t notice any latency when drawing onto the screen. The machine began to chug when I started trying to 3D model on the tablet section, but this was for a big project.

The CPU's liquid-cooling system also ensured the device ran quietly, through the back did noticeably heat up with prolonged use. Still, having no fan noise is a big boon.

My only serious performance issue with the Alpha 12 is its bloatware infestation. Acer’s loaded the Switch Alpha 12 with more unneeded and unwanted applications than you can shake a stick at. The moment you power up the device you’re bombarded with requests from numerous products. Lowlights include Acer Documents, Care Centre, abFiles, abPhoto and McAfee security. The one piece of welcome software, HoverAccess for the stylus, doesn't work properly.

Most of these offer superfluous clone services to those already included on Windows 10 and are nothing but an annoyance. Some will welcome the inclusion of McAfee, but I prefer to pick my security service provider and not have one pushed upon me, especially when the package is very aggressive and eats up memory and battery life.