Acer CloudMobile S500 review: Out of the blue

Synthetic benchmarks

The Acer CloudMobile S500 is powered by a Qualcomm MSM8260A chipset, which packs a dual-core 1.5GHz Krait processor, 1 GB of RAM and Adreno 225 GPU. We've seen great performance from Krait processors in the past - even in the dual-core variety - so we're eager to see how the S500 stacks up.

The CPU performance measured by BenchmarkPi is quite inspiring and handily beats most dual-cores out there. The result was similar to what we got from the HTC One S, which also features a dual-core 1.5GHz Krait.

Benchmark Pi

Lower is better

• Acer CloudMobile S500
  281
• HTC One S
  306
• Samsung Galaxy Premier
  372
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus
  447
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  452
• Samsung Galaxy S Advance
  530
• HTC Sensation XE
  536
• Sony Xperia S
  536
• Sony Xperia go
  543
• Sony Xperia sola
  551

In Linpack, the One S was for a long time the cream of the crop when it came to dual-core performance. It seems like Acer did a better job at squeezing out every ounce of power from both cores, and manage to put up the best numbers we've seen in Linpack from a dual-core.

Linpack

Higher is better

• Acer CloudMobile S500
  225.8
• HTC One S
  210.0
• Samsung Galaxy Premier
  96.1
• Sony Xperia S
  86.4
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  77.6
• Sony Xperia go
  69.9
• Sony Xperia sola
  68.1
• Samsung Galaxy S Advance
  64.7
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus
  63.7

The GPU inside the Acer CloudMobile S500 did well in NenaMark 2. It doesn't do as well as some of the other devices (like the One S), but not all have to push out 720 x 1280 pixels resolution. When all's said and done, the numbers were far from pedestrian.

NenaMark 2

Higher is better

• HTC One S
  60.5
• Acer CloudMobile S500
  58.2
• Samsung Galaxy Premier
  55.3
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  51.6
• Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1
  43.6
• Sony Xperia go
  42.8
• Sony Xperia S
  37.5
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus
  28.7
• Sony Xperia sola
  27.7

The SunSpider JavaScript benchmark showed some good browser performance from the S500. The significant advantage we see here by the Samsung Galaxy Premier can partly be attributed to performance enhancements brought about by Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Should the S500 receive this update, we expect this number to go up accordingly.

SunSpider

Lower is better

• Samsung Galaxy Premier
  1171
• Acer CloudMobile S500
  1541
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus
  1626
• HTC One S
  1708
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  1849
• Apple iPhone 4S
  2217
• Sony Xperia S
  2587
• Samsung Galaxy S Advance
  2663
• Sony Xperia sola
  2837
• Sony Xperia go
  3228

Browsermark has gone through a revamp process and has released version 2.0. Unfortunately, there is no way to translate scores from previous versions, so our database for this test will be sparse while we go through the process of retesting our devices.

BrowserMark 2

Higher is better

• LG Optimus G
  2555
• Acer CloudMobile S500
  1877
• Nokia Lumia 820
  1760
• Samsung Omnia W
  1632
• Samsung Galaxy S III (JB)
  1247
• Sony Xperia J
  587