Acer Swift 3 review: Excellent battery life

The Acer Swift 3 is not as amazingly lightweight as the Swift 5, which was one of my favourite notebooks last year. But at around 1.2kg, the 14-inch Swift 3 is pretty portable, too. More importantly, its battery life — just 14 minutes shy of 12 hours — is even better than the Swift 5's impressive 11-hour mark.

Quick specs

14-inch Full-HD screen
1.2kg
56 watt-hour battery
Intel Evo certified

The Swift 3 has a similar design as the premium Swift 5, but without the fancy trimmings. For instance, the screen bezels, especially the bottom one, are not as slim. Unlike the display on the Swift 5, the one on the Swift 3 is not a touchscreen. It is also not as bright. However, the lid can open up to 180 degrees — handy when I'm propping the notebook on bent knees.

The placement of the ports, keyboard and touchpad are similar for both Swift models. The Swift 3 comes with two full-size Type-A USB ports as well as a HDMI port, so you won't need a dongle. The Thunderbolt 4 port can also be used to charge the notebook. The keyboard offers limited key travel while the clicky Windows precision touchpad supports up to four-finger gestures. There's also an old-school fingerprint sensor below the arrow keys. But Acer should consider switching to a fingerprint-reading power button — like the ones offered by some of its competitors.

My review set comes with the latest Intel Core i5-1135G7 chip, though Acer also sells Core i7-powered versions. Coupled with 16GB of system memory and a 512GB solid-state drive, the Swift 3 feels responsive. A PCMark 10 score of 4,685 puts the Swift 3 comfortably ahead of last-gen notebooks like the Microsoft Surface Pro 7 (4,233), despite the latter's Core i7 chip.

At S$1,598, the Swift 3 is cheaper than the higher-end Swift 5 (S$2,098). But the former pulls ahead in battery stamina, perhaps because its Core i5 chips runs at a lower clock speed. Given its portability and performance, the Swift 3 — available from major e-commerce platforms such as Shopee — is an excellent companion for mobile users.

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Note: Review unit provided by Acer.

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