Acer Chromebook Tab 311 Review: Don’t Waste Your Money!

In our opinion, a good Chromebook just needs to do 3 things right. It needs to be fast enough for browsing, its battery life must be longer than a comparable Windows laptop, and the physical hardware has to be good enough to not get in the way. 

Acer sent us their newest Chromebook Tab 311, a robust tablet running ChromeOS with an integrated stylus and keyboard cover. It’s positioned as a direct challenger to Lenovo’s $350 Chromebook Duet, starting at a release price of $349. So can the Acer Tab 311 achieve the 3 things that every Chromebook needs? And who is this tablet for? 

I’ve used the Chromebook Tab 311 over the last 3 weeks for work, and even wrote this review on the tablet. And I found a couple critical problems that need addressing but also one big plus.

Design & Build

The Tab 311 is surprisingly bulky for an 11’’ display tablet at 610g. Thankfully, the keyboard cover isn’t too heavy so you’ll be able to lug it around just fine. The tablet shell is mostly aluminium with a small plastic stripe near the top. It feels sturdy, there’s hardly any flex, but the tablet is incredibly uncomfortable to hold in the hand without its complementary case. So we’d recommend always keeping the case on.

We think that the Tab 311 could be a great choice for an educational environment with its MIL STD 810H durability certification. The case and keyboard actually feel considerably better quality than the tablet body itself. The rear cover has a kickstand that allows the tablet to stand at any angle, and the keyboard attaches firmly via pogo pins to the bottom.

There’s an excellent selection of ports on the left side of the tablet. On the bottom left you have your USB-C charging port with USB 3.2 speeds and display output. So you’ll be able to use an external display with the tablet using a simple HDMI adapter or dongle. 

Right above the USB port sits the 3.5mm audio jack. Sadly, during our testing there was audible background white noise when using sensitive wired earphones connected to it. It’s fine for watching a YouTube video or videocalling with headphones, yes, but it’s not for serious music enthusiasts.

Above that you have your power button and volume rocker, and shockingly, a MicroSD card reader for storage expansion. There’s also a SIM-tray if you buy the LTE version of the tablet for cellular networking. On the very top right corner, the integrated stylus tucks into the tablet. It’s a good solution for hiding the stylus when you don’t need it. 

Performance

Chromebooks have the unique advantage of running Google’s lightweight ChromeOS. But that also means they usually have some of the weakest processors in any modern device. The Acer Tab 311 packs the Mediatek Kompanio 520 processor, a budget chip from 2022. It has 4GB or 8GB RAM and 128GB of storage. We tested the 8GB version.

Despite the aging chipset, browsing using Chrome, running Google Docs and watching videos will feel fine. Fast, even. That’s a positive surprise.

To measure performance, we use the Geekbench 6 CPU benchmarks. Here, the Acer sits right at the bottom for CPU single and multi-core scores from nearly all the tablets we’ve tested. The iPad 11’’ is 230% faster in single-core, and the Galaxy Tab S10 Lite is 60% better too.

GPU performance is important for efficient video-playback and gaming. We use 3DMark’s Wildlife series of tests to compare our laptops here. In Wildlife Extreme, the aforementioned iPad 11 is 13 times faster, and the S10 Lite 4x better. So no, you won’t be playing any demanding games on this Chromebook. Maybe that makes it ideal for use in schools though? 

Battery Life

The Chromebook is powered by a 29.65 Wh battery, and Acer claims 10 hours of battery life. The tablet charges at 45 Watts, which is reasonably fast. The battery seems to struggle a bit in the cold though. Even though the tablet was fully charged, it refused to start outside on a cold winter morning. I had to bring it indoors and connect the charger to get it to boot again.

Let’s talk about battery life. In our standardised youtube HD-video playback test, the tablet lasts 6.1 hours at max brightness. That’s a relatively weak result. The Galaxy Tab S10 Lite lasts 8 hours, for example. Of course, the Chromebook will still last through an average workday if it’s just used for browsing or notetaking with lower brightness. 

Display & Speakers

We’ve seen plenty of 11’’ tablets. But the Acer Tab 311 has the biggest display bezels out of all of them in a long time. Of course, you get used to the bezels, but it’s unfortunate you lose so much screen real-estate here.

Besides the ridiculous bezel width, the display is fine. It’s a 1200p panel with a 60HZ refresh rate. If you’re sitting at a typical tying distance, it’s sharp enough and you won’t spot individual pixels, but any closer and it starts looking worse. The panel tops out at a peak brightness of 400 nits. That’s just enough for indoors use in a brightly lit room. Watch out: Being outdoors on a sunny day is going to render the tablet unusable. 

The touch display isn’t the most responsive that we’ve tested, especially if you want to tap precisely on tiny buttons to close a Chrome tab, for example. But that’s more of an issue with the desktop style app scaling on ChromeOS. Using the keyboard trackpad or a mouse is almost mandatory. 

The dual speakers here are functional. You can watch a YouTube video or listen to a podcast, no problem. Voices come through clearly, and they’re loud enough. Streaming music isn’t going to sound great. 

Cameras

The front and rear cameras on the Tab 311 are pretty bad. The front selfie camera has a 2MP resolution and records HD video, and the rear camera has a 5MP resolution and can record in FHD. In a brightly lit environment, you’ll barely get by in a zoom call. And you can completely forget about taking any pictures. These cameras should be left for scanning PDFs at most. 

Read: Acer Swift 16 AI Review: We expected boring. We got brilliance

Software

ChromeOS offers a significant advantage. The Tab 311 will get a full 10 years of software and security updates. That gives it a longer support window than any Android or Apple tablet. 

Actually, I’ve become quite a fan of ChromeOS for work. It’s efficient, simple and has no distractions. Of course you’re limited mostly to Android apps from the Google Play store ,and Linux apps if you’re an advanced user, but if your work only needs a browser and web apps and office, you’re set here.

The setup is super fast. You turn the tablet on, log into a Google account and set a pin, and that’s it. Starting and restarting the tablet is nearly instant and there’s barely any lag on startup. It’s extremely refreshing to work on such an efficient OS, coming from Windows. Besides that, file management is also more intuitive than on MacOS. The tablet comes preinstalled with basic google apps like Gmail and the Google Play Store.

The only issue we’ve encountered so far is the lack of display compatibility. When connected to a 2k display, the tablet will continue to output FHD signal to the extended display, and not the native resolution. That’s a shame. 

Keyboard & Trackpad

So we get to the keyboard and trackpad, which are obviously important since touch navigation isn’t the smoothest. And here’s where it goes downhill a little.

The keys on the keyboard don’t have a lot of travel, but it still feels good to type on. The trackpad is a little worse, though. The area is way too small, and the trackpad sometimes misregisters inputs. It often seems too sensitive, and there’s not much you can do to fix that.

Other tablet keyboards like the Microsoft Surface Pro 12’s or the OnePlus Pad 3’s have far better trackpads, and of course most laptop trackpads and keyboards will feel better too. 

The Stylus 

So there’s the integrated pressure sensitive stylus that you can pull out of the top right of the tablet, a bit like the S-Pen on a Samsung phone. That being said, you won’t be getting the same quality and writing experience from an S-Pen. 

The stylus has a rectangular shape, which makes it pretty irritating to hold and write with. And that’s not to mention the lag you’ll experience in any writing app. We tested it in OneNote and Notewise. It’s not great in either apps. Both have noticeable input lag, the pressure sensitivity doesn’t feel very accurate and the odd shape isn’t nice to write for longer periods.

If you’re looking for a tablet with a good stylus, definitely check out our list of top picks. These are the best tablets with a pen you can buy right now and we review almost every tablet out there.

Is It Any Good? 

It’s pretty clear that the Acer Chromebook Tab 311 isn’t made for the average consumer. At $350, it just doesn’t offer the value from an equally priced Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 Lite. Anyone looking to do work should also just get a proper Windows laptop with a better keyboard and touchpad.

The real value here is the robust build quality, hassle free setup and 10 years of ChromeOS support. The Acer Tab 311 is almost tailor made for a classroom of hyperactive children. It’s robust and offers a usable desktop experience for school work, and the stylus is also better geared towards casual sketching. Its only real competition is Lenovo’s Chromebook Duet, which is a bit faster and can be had for cheaper. 

If you’re looking for a tablet-laptop hybrid, make sure to check out our review of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 Lite. It’s an affordable but high-quality Android tablet that comes with a better stylus, and the optional keyboard cover is outstanding too.