Choice is never a bad thing, but it does make the task difficult for a lot of people—especially youngsters planning to join colleges—to decide which laptop is best for their needs. These days, laptop vendors are actively targeting college students with various marketing strategies. This includes offering student discounts, highlighting features popular with students and emphasising portability and performance.
Outside of Apple MacBooks and the expensive Dell XPS range, Acer can be a good option. A long-standing name in the world of laptops, the company’s Swift range impresses with its thin and lightweight design; it mixes performance with style, as we discovered in the Swift Neo that we evaluated. Here are a few key takeaways.
The Swift Neo comes in a sleek aluminum chassis and weighs just 1.2kg. Our trial unit was in a Rose Gold finish, it looks stylish and an attractive piece of computing equipment that will surely appeal to young professionals, students, and content creators who are always on the move.
The laptop features a 35.56cm (14-inch) WUXGA OLED display with 92% NTSC and 100% sRGB colour accuracy, delivering crisp and vibrant visuals. During the trial period, I streamed a lot of movies from Netflix and Prime Video, browsed plenty of YouTube content and the OLED technology enhances every detail with deeper blacks, vivid colours, and a fine viewing experience. OLED screens offer superior picture quality compared to traditional LCDs, with advantages like deeper blacks, higher contrast ratios, and more vibrant colours. I also noticed that there are faster refresh rates and wider viewing angles, leading to a more immersive and visually appealing experience, especially for media consumption and gaming.
The Swift Neo is powered by Intel Core Ultra 5 processors, paired with upto 32GB LPDDR5 memory and upto 1TB NVMe PCIe Gen 4 SSD, ensuring fast storage and data retrieval. It is Copilot-ready, integrating AI capabilities to enhance creativity, productivity, and everyday computing. With Intel AI Boost, this laptop offers advanced AI-powered features, including AI apps for enhanced video calling and on-device AI processing for increased privacy and efficiency.
Among other attractions are the diamond-cut touchpad, one-hand open hinge, fingerprint reader, and backlit keyboard with a dedicated Copilot key; the latter make navigation and productivity effortless. Plus, the 1080p FHD webcam ensures clear video calls with enhanced security.
Connectivity options include Intel Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, and dual USB-C full-function ports. The Swift Neo delivers upto 8.5 hours of battery life. On the security front, it features biometric authentication like a fingerprint sensor for fast, secure access, along with Secured-Core PC protection at the hardware level to safeguard data even in high-risk scenarios.
The laptop’s best feature is what you’ll immediately notice as soon as you turn it on: its gorgeous 14-inch OLED display that enables plenty of contrast and richness in detail for a diverse content. With its sleek, lightweight design, this can be an ideal travel companion, that is powerful, portable and a pleasing device to flaunt around, hence a strong mention. The Swift Neo retails for a modest Rs 57,990 and is now available on Flipkart.
