Technologies

Acer Spin 5 Review: Solid 2-in-1 With an OLED Omission

Competing models only slightly more expensive boast OLED displays. But if that’s not a must-have for you, the Spin 5 is a reliably good, lightweight convertible.

The Acer Spin 5 is a lightweight, all-aluminum, two-in-one laptop with a high-resolution, 14-inch display powered by speedy 12th-gen Intel silicon.

Its plain looks, however, are closer to that of the midrange Lenovo Yoga 7i than premium laptop-tablet hybrids like the Lenovo Yoga 9i, Samsung Galaxy Book 2 Pro 360 or HP Spectre x360 14. These competing models look sleeker with design flourishes like rounded edges and corners for added comfort and style.

With a price that’s on par with these premium competitors, the Spin 5 begins to lose its appeal. And it has less to do with its staid design and more with a missing feature. While the Spin 5’s 14-inch, 16:10 display is crisp and bright, it’s an ordinary IPS panel rather than an OLED panel that would offer greater contrast and color accuracy.

In 2023, it’s difficult to recommend a $1,350 laptop that lacks an OLED display when OLED models cost only a smidgen more. It’s otherwise a solid commute-friendly two-in-one that even comes with an active pen that stores and charges in the body. You might want to wait for a sale, though.

7.8

Acer Spin 5

$1,350 at Acer

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Like

Strong overall performance
1080p webcam
Comfortable keyboard
Active pen included

Don’t Like

IPS display can’t compete with OLED
Ordinary appearance
So-so battery life

Acer sells one configuration of the Spin 5 (model SP514-51N-70LZ). It costs $1,350 at Acer and features a 12th-gen Core i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and a 14-inch, 16:10 display with a 2,560×1,600-pixel resolution. In the UK, the Acer Spin 5 costs 1,400. It’s not currently available in Australia.

You may also see some previous-generation Spin 5 models based on AMD and 11th-gen Intel processors. They’re easy to spot because they feature a 13.5-inch display with a taller 3:2 aspect ratio.

With its Core i7-1260P CPU, 16GB of RAM and integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics, our Spin 5 review system is at or near the top of our benchmarks among a group of similarly priced two-in-ones, with one not insignificant exception. It and the Samsung Galaxy Book 2 Pro 360 feature a CPU from Intel’s 12th-gen P series, which is more performance-oriented than Intel’s U-series chips found in some of the other models you’ll see in the performance charts. The Spin 5 and Samsung along with the AMD-based HP Envy x360 were the best overall performers. The script flips for the Spin 5, however, with battery life. It lasted 9 hours and 39 minutes on our battery drain test, which was an hour shorter than the next closest system.

Beige and boring but well built

The chief attraction of the Spin 5’s design is its sturdiness. The color of the aluminum is what Acer calls Concrete Gray. It looks as dull as that sounds. And to me, it’s more beige, but the all-metal chassis feels rock solid. There’s no hint of flex when you pick it up by a corner or type thunderously on the keyboard. Even the thin lid protecting the display feels rigid when many thin, aluminum lids flex too much to my liking.

Don’t mistake the Spin 5’s sturdiness for it being clunky or heavy. Weighing only 2.9 pounds, this is an exceedingly portable 14-inch system. The chassis is compact, with thin bezels framing the 16:10 display. Despite the trim chassis, the keyboard feels roomy; the only small-ish keys are the half-height up- and down-arrow keys. The keys offer snappy feedback with shallow travel and allow for speedy and near-silent typing. There’s two-level keyboard backlighting, and the power button doubles as a fingerprint reader that you can use with Windows Hello to log in without needing to bother with entering a password.

The touchpad is a bit undersized but wholly functional with responsive and accurate feedback. You can also navigate Windows via the touch display, which can be tapped and swiped on using your fingertip or the included active stylus. The pen can be garaged in the right edge of the laptop when it’s not needed.

Most 14-inch laptops feature a full-HD resolution, but the Spin 5 bumps it up to a 2.5K resolution(2,560×1,600 pixels) for an incredibly sharp picture. The 16:10 aspect ratio makes a huge difference on a 14-inch panel because, at this size, a widescreen 16:9 panel can feel cramped from top to bottom. It’s less of an issue on larger laptops, but at 14 inches and smaller, a 16:10 panel feels so much roomier vertically. You can see more lines on the screen in long documents and web pages and don’t need to scroll as frequently.

The Spin 5’s screen is rated for 425 nits of brightness, and I measured it even a bit brighter than that at around 450 nits. The display was bright enough to see clearly in my sunny breakfast nook, and I didn’t even need to max out the brightness slider.

OLED > IPS

So, the display is crisp and bright and yet I found it ultimately disappointing because an OLED panel becomes an option right around the Spin 5’s price. For roughly $1,500, you can get an OLED panel on the Lenovo Yoga 9i, HP Spectre x360 14 and Samsung Galaxy Book 2 Pro 360. And once you’ve used an OLED laptop and experienced the incredible contrast with absolute black levels and vibrant color, it’s hard to go back to an IPS panel unless you are shopping under $1,000.

OLED panels trickling down from high-end, high-priced laptops for content creators to midrange models is one of the best laptop trends of the past year. The other? The move from grainy 720p webcams to 1080p cameras. The Spin 5 may have missed out on the OLED trend, but it hopped on the 1080p webcam trend.

You will appear in fine, accurate detail to your video conference mates when seated in front of the Spin 5. The webcam isn’t an IR camera, however, so you can’t use facial recognition with Windows Hello. The camera also lacks a physical privacy cover, and there’s no kill switch on the keyboard to guarantee privacy when the camera isn’t being used.

The Spin 5 offers a useful selection of ports. There are a pair of USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 support and a pair of USB Type-A ports so you need to hassle with an adapter for your USB devices. The USB-A ports are split with one on each side of the system, but the USB-C ports are both located on the left side. I wish the USB-C ports were also split across each side because you need to use one of them to charge the laptop, and I would have liked the flexibility to connect the power cord to either side of the laptop depending where the nearest power outlet is located. The Spin 5 also supplies an HDMI port as well as a microSD card slot — a rare inclusion.

As currently configured and priced, the Acer Spin 5 is an awkward proposition. There’s no fatal flaw to this 14-inch two-in-one, but it’s priced right about where OLED models start to become an option. The Spin 5 makes sense if you can find it on sale for closer to $1,000, but a better option is waiting for an OLED two-in-one to go on sale for around what the Spin 5 costs right now.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for Jan. 17, #481

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle for Jan. 17, No. 481.

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition is a tough one. The blue group is a bit funny, once you recognize the connection. If you’re struggling with today’s puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Leading the pack.

Green group hint: Football division.

Blue group hint: Like Bridges or Goldblum.

Purple group hint: Blast off.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: In No. 1 position.

Green group: AFC East teams.

Blue group: Jeffs.

Purple group: Rockets.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is in No. 1 position. The four answers are first, front, lead and pole.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is AFC East teams. The four answers are Buffalo, Miami, New England and New York.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is Jeffs. The four answers are Bagwell, Kent, Saturday and Van Gundy.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is Rockets. The four answers are Clemens, Houston, Richard and Toledo.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

Technologies

Verizon Outage Caused by Software Issue, but Details Are Still Elusive

We’re still piecing together what caused Verizon’s extended service blackout, but network experts point to possibilities based on how it transpired.

After Verizon suffered a widespread, all-day outage this week that affected potentially 2 million customers, the cause still remains elusive. The company is offering a $20 credit to impacted customers, which appears to be trickling out via text message and in the myVerizon app.

Verizon hasn’t responded to a request for clarity about what happened. It did say that the problem was a «software issue» and that there was no indication of a «cybersecurity issue» in a statement to Mashable Thursday morning.

The loss in service was unique for its longevity. Unlike previous cellular outages, this one wasn’t region-specific and affected users across the US. When natural disasters take down cellular towers or hardware failures happen, the effects are felt in specific cities or areas. We saw reports (and CNET staffers chimed in) of service being down in New York, New Jersey, Florida, Hawaii, California and other spots.

Until Verizon shares more information, we can piece together some possibilities.

Analyst Roger Entner of Recon Analytics, a telecommunications research firm, suspects that a feature update went awry, based on how devices were affected. «It looks like their 5G SA (Standalone) core went down during a minor feature change,» he wrote to CNET.

Entner noted that the outage was limited to new high-end devices in selected markets where Verizon’s 5G SA core is deployed, which is why the outage wasn’t felt everywhere. The term 5G SA core refers to a network that uses only 5G technology and doesn’t rely on older 4G LTE infrastructure.

Entner also suggested the outage’s timing was unusual. «When carriers do massive upgrades, they do that between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. in the morning,» he said, suggesting that it could be due to an input error or automatic failure. «A noon start for the crash indicates ‘fat fingers’ for a smaller change that cascaded through the system.»

Lee W. McKnight, an Associate Professor at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies, believes the problem originated with a failed update to a Virtual Network Function (VNF), leading to «data overflows/cascading failures of other VNFs that were collateral damage from the first failure,» he wrote in an email exchange.

That also explains, McKnight theorizes, why many customers reported that their service resumed temporarily, only to fail again. «Like an engine stalling out, if all Verizon VNFs are not in sync [or] well orchestrated, the network is off-key,» he said.

A VNF is a virtualized service running on cloud platforms, versus on dedicated hardware. For this reason, McKnight’s proposed solution moving forward is that the big carriers need to provide more paid training for its technical staff «in what they are now: cloud software engineers,» he said.

Although we can’t confirm a specific cause for this outage, many Reddit commenters (some who claim to have worked at Verizon) lay some of the blame on Verizon’s recent layoffs that removed roughly 13,000 employees, many of them highly technical engineers with years of experience. Some discussions online speculate on what are frequent causes for network outages, like infrastructure damage, technical glitches or server failures, among others.

This is a developing story. Follow all of CNET’s Verizon news for more about the network outage.

Technologies

Motorola’s Moto Watch Is Officially Here With Polar-Level Fitness Cred

The $150 Moto Watch is built for work and workouts alike, and will be available for preorder starting January 22.

Motorola is adding more muscle to its smartwatch lineup. Unveiled at CES 2026, the $150 Moto Watch combines a polished design with Polar-backed health tracking, bringing the insights of a sports watch to to a smartwatch that looks just as much at home in the gym as it does at the office.

Instead of going all-in on a rugged sports-watch look, the Moto Watch is designed to feel like a jack of all trades, with advanced features like dual-band GPS and a battery life that lasts over a week, putting other flagships to shame.

But the Moto Watch isn’t exactly trying to go head to head with Android smartwatches either. Like recent Motorola watches, the Moto Watch doesn’t run Google’s Wear OS. Instead it relies on Motorola’s own software, with support limited to Android phones. That puts it closer in spirit to brands like Amazfit or Withings, carving out its own lane between fitness-focused wearables and full-fledged smartwatches.

The Polar partnership brings health clout

One of the biggest curveballs to come from the announcement is Motorola’s partnership with Polar, a veteran in the fitness world. Polar is known for its highly accurate heart-rate chest straps used by professional and serious athletes, as well as dedicated sports watches that compete more directly with Garmin than mainstream smartwatches.

By teaming up with Polar, Motorola is making it clear that it’s serious about health tracking and the partnership instantly brings credibility and expertise from a trusted name in the space. Motorola says the watch supports more nuanced fitness insights such as heart-rate variability, sleep stages and recovery. It’ll also support dual-frequency GPS for more accurate location tracking, a feature typically reserved for dedicated sport watches or higher-end models like the Apple Watch Ultra 3, the Pixel Watch 4 and newer Galaxy Watches.

Easy on the eyes, heavy on the battery life

The Moto Watch looks like a blend of rugged sportwatch and polished analogue, and that’s no accident. Motorola designed it to be sleek yet tough, built to transition seamlessly from sweaty gym sessions to formal evening wear.

It has an aluminum frame, stainless steel crown and a 47mm (1.43-inch) round OLED display covered in Corning’s Gorilla Glass 3. The watchbands are meant to be interchangeable, with a stainless steel, silicone and leather-like options. It’s also compatible with third-party watchbands. The watch has an IP68 rating for water and dust resistance, which means it can be submerged under a meter of water for 30 minutes.

Battery life is another major selling point for Motorola. The company says the Moto Watch can last up to 13 days on a charge in raise-to-wake mode, or up to seven days with the always-on display enabled. If those claims hold up, the Moto Watch would leave most Android smartwatches from Samsung and Google trailing behind with their typical two-day battery life. Motorola also says the Moto Watch supports fast charging, adding roughly a day’s worth of charge in just 5 minutes.

Part of a broader Motorola ecosystem

Rather than positioning the Moto Watch as a standalone product, Motorola repeatedly framed it as part of its expanding Moto Things ecosystem. The watch integrates with Smart Connect, Motorola’s app for managing experiences across phones, tablets, and accessories.

Motorola also teased future alignment with its upcoming Qira AI platform, designed to work across Lenovo PCs, Motorola phones, tablets, and wearables. While there was no mention of any watch-specific AI features, Motorola says future updates could allow notifications, reminders and tasks to flow more seamlessly between devices.

Too soon to reach a verdict

Time will tell how the Moto Watch holds up in real-world testing. The watch will be available for preorders starting January 22 through Motorola’s website, and will officially go on sale on January 28.

For now, the Moto Watch offers a glimpse of Motorola’s vision for wearables, aiming to build an ecosystem of products that work seamlessly together. It’s not trying to pick up where it left off with its Moto 360 smartwatch (discontinued in 2019), but rather carve out a new lifestyle-focused niche backed by credible fitness tracking and long battery life.

For more announcements and first looks ahead of CES 2026, check out CNET’s full CES coverage.