Acer Aspire E15 (E5-567-36QR) review: Future-ready entry-level laptop

Specifications

• Operating System - Windows 10 Home
• Processor & Chipset - Intel
• Processor Type - Core i3
• Processor Model - i3-7020U
• Processor Speed - 2.3 GHz
• Processor Core - Dual-core (2 Core)
• Graphics Card - Intel HD 620
• Memory - 4 GB DDR3L SDRAM
• Screen Size - 39.6 cm (15.6")
• Display Screen Type - LCD
• Screen Resolution - 1920 x 1080
• Card Reader - Yes
• Storage - 1 TB HDD
• Optical Drive Type - DVD-Writer
• Number of Speakers - 2
• Sound Mode - Stereo
• Interfaces/Ports - HDMI and VGA
• Number of USB 2.0 Ports -1
• Number of USB 3.0 Ports - 2
• Operating System - Windows 10 Home

 

Design

The Acer Aspire is a casual looking laptop, and the design is pretty familiar to the other entry-level laptops. We are all familiar with the boxy design of the Acer Aspire E15, which is both a good and bad thing.

The entire body is made using high-quality polycarbonate, which makes it light in weight. However, some of the parts on the laptop feels flimsy, especially on the top portion of the smartphone. One differentiating factor about the laptop is the finish on the top panel with a pattern like finish, which gives a premium feel to the laptop.

With respect to the overall build quality, the laptop met our expectations, and it is light in weight compared to the competition, which makes it easy to carry.

I/O

One of the most interesting aspects of the Acer Aspire E15 is the wide range of I/O ports. In fact, the laptop has all the ports that one can ask for.

It has a full-sized HDMI port, VGA Port, three USB-A ports, USB type-C port, SD card slot, 3.5 mm headphone jack, DVD drive, and an ethernet port. It also has an M.2 SSD slot, which can be used to upgrade the storage of the laptop to an M.2 SSD to get faster performance.

If you are looking for a laptop with all the necessary ports, then the Acer Aspire E15 is the one to consider.

Display

The Acer Aspire has a 15.5-inch IPS LCD screen with FHD resolution (1920 x 1080p) with anti-glare finish offering 60 Hz refresh rate. The display on the laptop is pretty bright in the indoor condition. However, the brightness is not up to the mark to use the laptop in the outdoor condition.

Though the color reproduction is on point with the high amount of saturation and details, the laptop has a pretty bad viewing angle. In fact, even with just 4 degrees of display tilt, the content on display loses the clarity and becomes blurry.

Overall, the Acer Aspire E15 has a basic 1080p display, which offers an equivalent amount of advantages and disadvantages.

Sound and Camera

The Acer Aspire has a dual stereo speaker setup, which gets pretty loud with a great amount of clarity even at higher volumes. The speaker setup is TrueHarmony certified, which will further enhance the sound profile on the laptop.

The 3.5 mm headphone jack does reproduce high-quality audio with premium features like Dolby Atmos and Spatial Sound (Windows Sonic for Headphones).

The laptop has a 0.9 MP front-facing selfie camera with 720p video recording capability. The selfie camera is pretty basic, which will work for normal VoIP video calls.

Keyboard and Trackpad

The Acer Aspire E15 has a full-size chiclet keyboard with a dedicated numerical keypad on the right side of the keyboard. The keyboard offers a good amount of travel with a satisfactory keyboard using experience. However, the keyboard lacks backlit lighting, which could be a deal breaker for someone who uses the laptop in the low-lighting condition.

The trackpad is again a standard trackpad with a single clickable button. The trackpad is very sensitive and offers gesture support as well. We did not expect more from this trackpad, and it did offer best-in-class experience.

Performance

The 7th Gen Intel Core-i3 processor powers the Acer Aspire E15 with an integrated Intel HD-620 GPU, paired with 4 GB DDR3L RAM and 1 TB HDD with 5200 RPM.

With respect to day to day usage, the laptop can keep up with the normal tasks like web browsing, watching movies or videos, or even using a Microsoft Office Suite of apps like PowerPoint, Wordpad, and Excel.

However, when it comes to slightly demanding tasks like using Abode photoshop or playing games, the laptop struggles to keep up with the phase and shows a visible amount of lag while opening games and apps.

In fact, even opening more than 5 tabs on the Google Chrome will also slow-down the laptop due to the limited amount of RAM (4 GB RAM).

We feel that upgrading the RAM to 8 GB and changing to storage to an SSD will improve the overall performance of the laptop. Overall, the with respect to CPU performance, the Acer Aspire E15 is in accordance with other similarly priced laptops.

Don't even try to play games on the laptop, as the built-in GPU is not capable of rendering games. We tried to install the mobile version of the PUBG on the Acer Aspire E15 using a simulator, and we were not happy with the on-game performance, especially for a mobile version of the game.

Connectivity

The laptop supports both 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz Wi-Fi bands with Gigabit download and upload standards. The device also offers Bluetooth 4, which can be used to Bluetooth peripherals like wireless headphones and wireless speakers.

Battery

The Acer Aspire E15 has a 45watt hour battery, which can last up to 4.5 hours on a single charge with normal usage. The device can be charged from a 40W power brick.

In the real-world usage, on a single charge, the laptop can play up to two full-length movies with maximum volume via speakers. The laptop can easily last up to a typical day of usage on a single charge without any hassle.

Improvements that we want to see on the next gen Aspire E15

The Acer Aspire E15 is a great entry-level laptop. However, it also has some disadvantages or improvements that we want to see in the next generation Acer Aspire E15 laptop.

• Added security using Windows Hello (Face Unlock and Fingerprint sensor)
• Improve display brightness
• Improve viewing angles
• Faster HDD (at least 7200 RPM)
• At least 8 GB of RAM
• Built-in SSD for faster bootup speeds

Verdict

The Acer Aspire is a good entry-level laptop, especially for those who are looking for a notebook which can handle basic tasks like web-browsing, watching movies, and doing office work.

The display and speakers are good enough for the multimedia consuming experience. However, the company could have used a high-quality IPS LED panel with an improved viewing angle.

If you are in the market for the laptop, under Rs 30,000, then the Acer Aspire E15 is the laptop that you can easily trust. It offers a wide range of I/O ports with an option to upgrade storage and RAM in the near future, which makes it a future proof device.