Acer Aspire V5-171 laptop: An affordable alternative to an Ultrabook

After the Asus Vivobook S200E we saw yesterday, here’s another capable alternative to the Ultrabook without the price tag. The Acer Aspire V5-171 laptop costs a mere £330 at Currys, a saving of £170 off its suggested retail price of £500.

This thin-and-light laptop shares a lot of features with other Ultrabooks on the market, most notably its weight at 1.34Kg.

It runs on an Intel Core i3-3217U processor, clocked at 1.8GHz, with two cores and 3MB cache, Intel HD Graphics 4000 (which means that it is based on Ivy Bridge), a surprising 6GB of RAM, 500GB SATA hard disk, an 11.6in 1,366 x 768 display, two USB ports, a card reader, VGA, HDMI and an Ethernet port, a webcam, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a webcam and an island-style keyboard.

It has a four-cell battery that can power the device for around four hours. It doesn’t have an optical drive, which explains why it is so light, but comes with a number of Acer-only applications, all running on Windows 8. The other ultra-portable device we viewed recently, the S200E, is more expensive but comes with a touchscreen.

It will be interesting to see whether other manufacturers come up with similar laptops which are not only much smaller than Ultrabooks but also, as we saw in the Aspire V5-171 and the Vivobook S200E, cheaper as well.