I bought the aforementioned laptop, the Swift Go 14 SFG14-71, almost two months ago. It is more or less a replacement for the Xenia 14 that I bought and returned about six months ago. The Xenia was a really nice laptop, save for one key flaw… he screen was so flexy that I was afraid that the LCD panel would fail prematurely.
I never did a proper review of the Swift Go 14, as I usually do when I buy a new laptop, but I do like the unit quite a lot. 2240 x 1400 IPS display (16:10) with close to 100% sRGB gamut, no light fringing around the outside like on the Dell XPS 13, a decent enough keyboard (not quite up to the Dell’s level, but still pretty good), a bigger battery than in the Dell, and one that appears to be rated by Acer for 1000 cycles vs. only 300 on the “super premium” XPS, a HDMI port and two USB type A ports in addition to the two USB-C/Thunderbolt 4/power delivery ports, a 13th gen i5-1335U CPU (2 P-cores, 8 E-cores), 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM, a replaceable AX211 wifi card (the XPS 13’s is soldered), and two M.2 SSD (NVMe/PCIe 4 x 4) slots.
The one glaring thing the Swift Go is missing, compared to the XPS 13, is a “premium” glass touchpad surface. Once you’ve used the glass ones, you can’t go back to plastic. The feel is night and day better on the glass surface.
The Swift 14 Go is sold as having a touchpad with “ocean glass” surface, which at first you would think is some kind of… well, glass, since glass touchpads are definitely a thing, and it says “glass” right in it. But no. “ocean glass” touchpads are garbage.
Literal garbage.
Apparently, someone fishes all that plastic waste out of the ocean and melts it down to create… touchpads, because why not?
It looks like Acer is trying to demonstrate their enviromental consciousness by using touchpads made of recycled plastic. Because touchpads use up so much material, it just makes sense to use recyclables, or something… I really don’t get it. There are a lot more things that make more sense to source from recycled plastic than touchpads (like the vests that Wal-Mart employees wear).
The ‘ocean glass’ touchpad on the Swift is a fairly typical-feeling plastic touchpad. My XPS, my Xenia 15, and my former Xenia 14 all had or have glass touchpads. The Acer stands out in how poorly its touchpad feels compared to the others. At slower speeds, my finger chatters across the surface (the rapid starting and stopping motion). It’s annoying.
The Acer is too nice a unit to not have a glass touchpad. I had to find a way to fix it.
The easiest way to do that would be to find another model that has the correct size touchpad, but with a glass surface already on it. I didn’t find anything like that. It would have to be more than just the touchpad itself having the right dimensions and corner radius… it would have to also have the hinge mount design that matches my laptop.
There are glass screen protectors for smartphones, though, and I thought that perhaps there is someone that does custom protectors. There is, it turns out.
I used my digital vernier caliper to get the dimensions, and I bought a set of radius gauges on the jungle web site to measure the corner radius. 105mm x 65mm x 4mm corner radius.
I placed the order, and soon the nano glass protectors (I bought three, as they were only a bit more than one) were on the way. From Australia. I had no idea that the .us site was really Australian, but if they work, that’s fine.
That was about a week and a half ago, and they arrived today.
Installing the protector was not that hard, and after I squeezed out the air bubbles using the included tool, I put the laptop back together and tried it out.
It works! The feel is much better than with the plastic touchpad surface. It’s quite shiny, now, where before it was a semi-matte, but that is fine. I will add that it cost a lot more to do it this way than it would have if Acer had just included a glass touchpad and bumped the price to compensate. It was around $40, including shipping, which was well worth it if they keep working well. The only real failure point would be in the adhesive. Time will tell if that comes to pass.
I must say that while the feel is much improved, it’s still not as good as the touchpad feel on the Xenias or the XPS. There’s no more chattering, but the drag under moderate pressure on the pad is still greater than it would be on the others. I suspect this has to do with the protector’s intended use on smartphones, where the visual clarity of the screen as seen through he protector is a key factor. Indeed, if I compare my Acer touchpad to my Motorola smartphone, which has no screen protector over its glass surface, they feel about the same. The phone may be just a touch slicker, as it probably came with a factory oleophobic coating, but by now there’s probably not much of it left.
Touchpads on laptops have a subtle texture to them that improves the feel and reduces the surface area for your finger to glide upon. That texture would presumably change how the screen looks on a smartphone, but on a touchpad, it doesn’t matter.
Still, having my touchpad feel like a glass smartphone touchscreen isn’t bad. I wonder if those aftermarket oleophobic coatings are any good.
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)
