Acer 721 Mini Laptop

Acer has been releasing 11.6-inch mini laptops for quite some time and the company is enjoying great success with this size. The Acer 721 is clearly the fastest mini laptop I’ve tested, as long as you don’t factor in graphics performance. Also, it doesn’t have the best battery life out there. So should you buy one?

Acer has improved its build quality by a wide margin with the Aspire One 721. Everything from its case to the hinge felt very solid. It comes equipped with a bright screen that is viewable from multiple angles. However, it looks better when viewed from the front. There is a bit of glare from reflection, but I had no problem looking at the screen when writing this review. It comes with plenty of ports including three USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, VGA, LAN, microphone, headphone jack, and an SD card reader.

The keyboard on the 721 mini laptop is excellent. It stretches from one edge to another. At first, the keys felt a bit awkward as I found them too big for my liking, but after 5 minutes, I was navigating at over 100 words per minute. That said, I’m not a big fan of those little arrow keys. The touchpad is also big enough for a mini laptop that has a 11.6-inch screen. Performance-wise it beats most of its competitors, thanks to the powerful AMD Neo K125 processor and Intel GMA 4500 graphics. The unit came with a 6-cell 4400 mAh battery and I was able to achieve a good 4.5 hours of operation. with a single charge. These are not bad figures for such a powerful mini laptop.

Its bottom features a large panel that can be easily removed by unscrewing a few screws. This reveals the hard drive and RAM to the user. There are two RAM slots that allow you to upgrade to a maximum of 4GB.