We recently raved about the $329.99 Acer Spin 1, the Taiwanese tech giant's least expensive 2-in-1 convertible laptop.
The Spin 3 ($499.99) is Acer's next step up, slotting in above the Spin 1 and below the Spins 5 and 7.
As budget 2-in-1s go, the Spin 3 has a good feature set and respectable performance, and its 1TB hard drive offers reams more storage than the Editors' Choice Spin 1's 32GB of eMMC flash.
But the 5,400rpm drive is a drag on performance, and launching apps takes patience.
Thoroughly spoiled by PCs with SSDs, we would recommend spending $100 more to get an upgraded model of the Spin 3 with a 256GB solid-state drive and twice the memory that's in our base configuration.
Crosshatched Cool
A classy-looking convertible, the Spin 3 has an aluminum lid etched with fine horizontal and vertical lines (the keyboard deck and palm rest are horizontal brushed aluminum).
Like other Lenovo Yoga workalikes, you can fold its display back from Laptop to Tablet mode, as well as an easel-style Stand mode for presentations and an A-frame Tent mode for using touch apps in confined spaces.
It measures 0.82 by 13.2 by 9.1 inches, making it a bit bigger than the Asus ZenBook Flip 14 UX461UN (0.55 by 12.9 by 8.9 inches) but smaller than 15.6-inch hybrids like the Samsung Notebook 9 Pro (0.67 by 13.7 by 9.4 inches).
At 3.75 pounds, it weighs almost exactly as much as the Notebook 9 Pro, or noticeably more than the Flip 14 (3.31 pounds).
But the Acer and its small, square AC adapter are no burden in a briefcase.
Medium-thick bezels surround the glossy screen, which has a webcam centered above it (there's neither a face recognition camera nor fingerprint reader for Windows Hello logins).
The webcam captures pretty good images that are slightly soft-focus but well lit and not grainy.
A speaker grille above the keyboard wraps around the rear edge for, Acer claims, sound that faces you no matter which mode you're using.
The Spin 3's audio is impressive—while not the loudest we've heard (though enough to fill a medium-sized room), it sounds clear and crisp without being distorted or tinny.
You won't hear a ton of bass, but you'll enjoy listening to your MP3s and streaming music.
The Missing Port
On the convertible's left side, you'll find the AC adapter connector, an HDMI port, and two USB 3.0 Type-A ports.
The right edge holds a USB 2.0 port, an SD card slot, and a headphone jack as well as the power button and a lock slot.
We're disappointed by the lack of USB-C connectivity, though we don't insist on it in under-$500 systems, a category the Spin 3 fits by a penny.
The keyboard is not backlit and lacks dedicated Home and End keys (they're doubled up on the Page Up and Page Down keys), but to its credit offers inverted-T instead of single-row cursor arrows, as well as Ctrl and Delete keys in their proper lower left and upper right corners respectively.
It has a shallow and plasticky, but not uncomfortable, typing feel, with firm tactile feedback.
We're less satisfied with the Spin 3's touchpad: It glides smoothly enough and responds well to taps, but its bottom-corner buttons take considerable pressure and the right-click button feels loose and rattly.
The 14-inch 1,920-by-1,080 IPS touch screen is attractive albeit reflective—visions of lights, windows, or objects in the room interfere with its wide viewing angles.
Seen from close to straight on, however, it offers sharp details and bright colors, though we could wish for one or two more clicks of backlight brightness.
Touch screen operations are precise and responsive.
Acer preloads the Windows 10 Home convertible with utilities and links ranging from the useful (Dashlane) to the commercial (Booking.com, Ebates) and backs it with a one-year warranty.
Performance vs.
Price
Available in 14-inch and 15.6-inch flavors, the Spin 3 has a variety of CPU and storage configurations available.
Ours is the base model with a Core i3-8130U, a 2.2GHz (3.4GHz turbo) dual-core processor, and a minimally adequate 4GB of RAM.
That latest-generation CPU led the Spin 3 to easily outpace the less expensive, Celeron-based Spin 1, just as it gets its butt kicked by the more expensive, Core i7-powered Asus ZenBook Flip 14.
Its performance is more in line with its fellow Core i3 hybrids, the 12.5-inch Lenovo Yoga 720 and the 13.3-inch Dell Latitude 3390.
See How We Test Laptops
The Spin 3 posted a perfectly respectable score of 2,819 in our PCMark 8 office productivity benchmark (we consider 2,500 adequate and 3,000 excellent) and completed our Handbrake video-editing exercise in under two-and-a-half minutes (though that's twice as long as the quad-core Asus).
The ZenBook and its Nvidia GeForce MX150 discrete graphics crushed the Spin 3 and the other integrated-graphics 2-in-1s in our 3DMark test and Valley and Heaven gaming simulations.
The latter are definitely destined only for casual or browser-based games, not the latest high-octane titles.
The Spin 3's best test result was in our battery life rundown, where it lasted for 11 hours of video playback, second only to the Asus and nearly five hours longer than the Latitude 3390 ($599.00 at Dell Technologies) .
But while our test machine's objective benchmark scores were acceptable, subjectively it felt unresponsive, forcing us to wait a beat for Windows' settings menu or losing a step when we loaded a dozen browser tabs.
The system's 4GB rather than 8GB of RAM probably has something to do with it, but we'll assign the lion's share of the blame to the hard drive—tempting us, as we said, to cure both ills by climbing to Acer's $599.99 model.
Worth a Spin?
Unfortunately, that upgraded model was harder to find online at the time of this writing, leaving the Spin 3 in the same budget convertible segment where we've already chosen to highlight the Spin 1.
We don't dislike the Spin 3, but we dislike its spinning platter.
If you can find the Spin 3 with upgraded RAM and an SSD, it's worth the $100 premium.
Otherwise, if you store most of your files in the cloud, the Spin 1 is an excellent alternative that costs almost $200 less.
Acer Spin 3 (SP314-51-38XK)
Pros
Handsome touch screen.
Nice sound.
Good battery life.
The Bottom Line
The Acer Spin 3 is a 14-inch convertible laptop that hits the $500 price point, but for performance's sake we'd spend an extra $100 to upgrade the memory and storage.
We recently raved about the $329.99 Acer Spin 1, the Taiwanese tech giant's least expensive 2-in-1 convertible laptop.
The Spin 3 ($499.99) is Acer's next step up, slotting in above the Spin 1 and below the Spins 5 and 7.
As budget 2-in-1s go, the Spin 3 has a good feature set and respectable performance, and its 1TB hard drive offers reams more storage than the Editors' Choice Spin 1's 32GB of eMMC flash.
But the 5,400rpm drive is a drag on performance, and launching apps takes patience.
Thoroughly spoiled by PCs with SSDs, we would recommend spending $100 more to get an upgraded model of the Spin 3 with a 256GB solid-state drive and twice the memory that's in our base configuration.
Crosshatched Cool
A classy-looking convertible, the Spin 3 has an aluminum lid etched with fine horizontal and vertical lines (the keyboard deck and palm rest are horizontal brushed aluminum).
Like other Lenovo Yoga workalikes, you can fold its display back from Laptop to Tablet mode, as well as an easel-style Stand mode for presentations and an A-frame Tent mode for using touch apps in confined spaces.
It measures 0.82 by 13.2 by 9.1 inches, making it a bit bigger than the Asus ZenBook Flip 14 UX461UN (0.55 by 12.9 by 8.9 inches) but smaller than 15.6-inch hybrids like the Samsung Notebook 9 Pro (0.67 by 13.7 by 9.4 inches).
At 3.75 pounds, it weighs almost exactly as much as the Notebook 9 Pro, or noticeably more than the Flip 14 (3.31 pounds).
But the Acer and its small, square AC adapter are no burden in a briefcase.
Medium-thick bezels surround the glossy screen, which has a webcam centered above it (there's neither a face recognition camera nor fingerprint reader for Windows Hello logins).
The webcam captures pretty good images that are slightly soft-focus but well lit and not grainy.
A speaker grille above the keyboard wraps around the rear edge for, Acer claims, sound that faces you no matter which mode you're using.
The Spin 3's audio is impressive—while not the loudest we've heard (though enough to fill a medium-sized room), it sounds clear and crisp without being distorted or tinny.
You won't hear a ton of bass, but you'll enjoy listening to your MP3s and streaming music.
The Missing Port
On the convertible's left side, you'll find the AC adapter connector, an HDMI port, and two USB 3.0 Type-A ports.
The right edge holds a USB 2.0 port, an SD card slot, and a headphone jack as well as the power button and a lock slot.
We're disappointed by the lack of USB-C connectivity, though we don't insist on it in under-$500 systems, a category the Spin 3 fits by a penny.
The keyboard is not backlit and lacks dedicated Home and End keys (they're doubled up on the Page Up and Page Down keys), but to its credit offers inverted-T instead of single-row cursor arrows, as well as Ctrl and Delete keys in their proper lower left and upper right corners respectively.
It has a shallow and plasticky, but not uncomfortable, typing feel, with firm tactile feedback.
We're less satisfied with the Spin 3's touchpad: It glides smoothly enough and responds well to taps, but its bottom-corner buttons take considerable pressure and the right-click button feels loose and rattly.
The 14-inch 1,920-by-1,080 IPS touch screen is attractive albeit reflective—visions of lights, windows, or objects in the room interfere with its wide viewing angles.
Seen from close to straight on, however, it offers sharp details and bright colors, though we could wish for one or two more clicks of backlight brightness.
Touch screen operations are precise and responsive.
Acer preloads the Windows 10 Home convertible with utilities and links ranging from the useful (Dashlane) to the commercial (Booking.com, Ebates) and backs it with a one-year warranty.
Performance vs.
Price
Available in 14-inch and 15.6-inch flavors, the Spin 3 has a variety of CPU and storage configurations available.
Ours is the base model with a Core i3-8130U, a 2.2GHz (3.4GHz turbo) dual-core processor, and a minimally adequate 4GB of RAM.
That latest-generation CPU led the Spin 3 to easily outpace the less expensive, Celeron-based Spin 1, just as it gets its butt kicked by the more expensive, Core i7-powered Asus ZenBook Flip 14.
Its performance is more in line with its fellow Core i3 hybrids, the 12.5-inch Lenovo Yoga 720 and the 13.3-inch Dell Latitude 3390.
See How We Test Laptops
The Spin 3 posted a perfectly respectable score of 2,819 in our PCMark 8 office productivity benchmark (we consider 2,500 adequate and 3,000 excellent) and completed our Handbrake video-editing exercise in under two-and-a-half minutes (though that's twice as long as the quad-core Asus).
The ZenBook and its Nvidia GeForce MX150 discrete graphics crushed the Spin 3 and the other integrated-graphics 2-in-1s in our 3DMark test and Valley and Heaven gaming simulations.
The latter are definitely destined only for casual or browser-based games, not the latest high-octane titles.
The Spin 3's best test result was in our battery life rundown, where it lasted for 11 hours of video playback, second only to the Asus and nearly five hours longer than the Latitude 3390 ($599.00 at Dell Technologies) .
But while our test machine's objective benchmark scores were acceptable, subjectively it felt unresponsive, forcing us to wait a beat for Windows' settings menu or losing a step when we loaded a dozen browser tabs.
The system's 4GB rather than 8GB of RAM probably has something to do with it, but we'll assign the lion's share of the blame to the hard drive—tempting us, as we said, to cure both ills by climbing to Acer's $599.99 model.
Worth a Spin?
Unfortunately, that upgraded model was harder to find online at the time of this writing, leaving the Spin 3 in the same budget convertible segment where we've already chosen to highlight the Spin 1.
We don't dislike the Spin 3, but we dislike its spinning platter.
If you can find the Spin 3 with upgraded RAM and an SSD, it's worth the $100 premium.
Otherwise, if you store most of your files in the cloud, the Spin 1 is an excellent alternative that costs almost $200 less.
Acer Spin 3 (SP314-51-38XK)
Pros
Handsome touch screen.
Nice sound.
Good battery life.
The Bottom Line
The Acer Spin 3 is a 14-inch convertible laptop that hits the $500 price point, but for performance's sake we'd spend an extra $100 to upgrade the memory and storage.
