The Acer Aspire R 13 Review: Convertible Notebook With A Twist

Battery Life

Battery life has made some big strides recently, and as alluded to earlier, a lot of that comes down to lower power consumption from key components like the CPU, storage, and wireless. Intel moved to their 14nm Broadwell parts, and pretty much all Ultrabooks have made the transition to Broadwell at this point. This leaves the display as one of the largest power draws left, and that has also become more power efficient.

Acer offers up two different display options, with a 1920x1080p as the base. The reduced pixel density of a 1080p display can help quite a bit with battery life. The optional display, which is the one that is equipped on this review unit, is a 2560x1440 Sharp IGZO panel. The IGZO technology has been a big help on battery life, so we shall see if it helps this Acer as well.

To measure battery life, we have two tests. The light workload test consists of light web browsing, with the display set to 200 nits brightness. Time is logged until the device shuts down. The heavy workload test adds more pages, a movie is played using the Windows Video app, and a 1 MB/s file download occurs during the duration to ensure the wireless keeps active.

On our light test, the Acer Aspire R 13 ends up just over nine hours, which is very solid, although not close to the highest results in this test. The battery capacity of the Acer is 50 Wh, which is slightly less than the Dell XPS 13’s 52 Wh, but is right around the average for this size of notebook.

On our heavy test, the Acer clocks in at just under 5.5 hours. Once again this is a good result, although it is still a ways off of the highest scores in this test. This is a much more demanding test and some devices can falter here, and although we did not get sampled the 1080p model, it would be nice to see what kind of a difference the lower resolution would make on battery life. It doesn’t sound like much, but WQHD is 78% more pixels than 1080p, which makes a big difference.

To take a look at overall platform efficiency, we divide the battery life by the battery capacity. To kind of show how far we’ve come in battery life, the R 13 with a WQHD display is more efficient than the Haswell based Acer S7 that Anand tested, and it had the 1080p display, and there is a huge jump since Ivy Bridge which I have included as well just to show how far we have come in just a couple of years. Unfortunately the Haswell based S7 was never tested on our heavy test so it is absent from those results. On the heavy test, the Acer is once again a bit more efficient than the QHD+ XPS 13 which we have seen to be one of the better devices this year. The Acer really just needs more battery capacity to come in with stronger battery life results since the normalized scores are pretty good for a higher DPI device.

Charge Time

Acer ships the R 13 with a 45 watt power adapter, which is pretty typical for this class of device.

The charge time is quite good on the Aspire R 13, with the R 13 right near the top of the charts in this regard. The A/C adapter for this unit though has a very thin barrel connector and it does not feel overly robust. I would have liked Acer to have come up with a better solution here.