[rwp-review id=”0″]
I have a feeling that by the time I’m done writing this review, my fingers (which bear a striking resemblance to sausages) will be accustomed to the keyboard of this Acer Aspire S7 I’m typing away on in a dingy lit coffee shop. Yes, with this laptop I no longer need to work from the office chair while sipping on a caffeinated beverage and being mildly annoyed by colleagues crowding around the water dispenser exchanging the latest politifacts of the US elections. Instead with this laptop I’ve entered the highest realms associated with mobility. Now I can sit in a slightly comfortable, posture killing sofa couch, sipping on an overpriced, diluted cup-a-crap as young teenagers zoom by on mini segways “that are all the craze.” Suffice to say, the Aspire A7 got me aspiring to be out and about and by that I mean into another chair.
But enough about me and my dismally boring aspirations.
The Acer Aspire S7 is the next Ultrabook in the history of Ultrabooks to attempt to dethrone the Macbook Air, but can it?
Design and Hardware
The Aspire S7 has a gorgeous design, reminiscent of a Macbook and equally breathtaking. The shiny and pearl white plastic wraps the light aluminium frame, with the whole thing encased in a layer of gorilla glass III that ensures my saliva can be effortlessly polished off. Shiny and chrome indeed.
The backlit keyboard on the S7 is fantastic (once you get used to it), letting you type away on it late into the hours of the night without having to get up and switch on your lights. The only drawback about it is the awkward key placements, though bear in mind that I am foremost a desktop person and therefore prefer a separate keyboard. One of the annoying things about the S7 I found to be was the placement of the “delete” key, it was situated right next to the arrow keys, making navigating with them a tad difficult when you realise that you’re accidentally erasing a few letters every time you move down a line. Another issue is the placement of the power button: it’s on the side right next to the audio jack.
The most important thing about the S7 is its thickness, or rather thinness. It only measures at 12.5 mm thick, making the MacBook Air look rather out of shape. To top it off it weighs only 1.3 Kg, making it as light as a notepad and letting you easily tuck it under one arm and carry it around if you wish to. In fact, its incredible lightness made my laptop bag swing all over the place quite easily while traipsing in the severe dust storms we experienced the other day here in Dubai. This may give an aura of flimsiness but in reality it’s far from it as the S7 is quite sturdy and robust.
Hardware wise the S7 packs quite a punch for an ultrabook. That being said don’t expect to play Crysis on high graphics on this machine, the S7 is after all a lightweight boxer, not a heavyweight. I had the S7 that sported a 2.0 GHz i7 processor, though mine seemed to go above and beyond that by clocking in at 3.0 GHz according to Task Manager; I clearly had a turbo-boosted S7. Complementing this rather souped up processor was 4 gigs of DDR3 RAM. The only let down to this entire ensemble of goodies is the integrated graphics chip which is an Intel HD Graphic 4000 card. That’s a bit of a let down to the gamer in me, but let’s face it, who’s going to use an ultrabook to game anyway?
Worthy of note is also the quietness that comes with the S7; lacking is the whirring of a noisy fan and yet it never heated to the point of discomfort while I reviewed it.
A few other features the S7 has are two USB 3.0 slots, a micro HDMI port, a memory card, an audio port for a headset and a webcam. Acer also packs a VGA to micro HDMI cable as well as an Ethernet to USB 3.0 adapter.
Performance
Display
Right of the bat the incredibly sharp 1080p touchscreen pushes any faults of the S7 aside. With Windows 8 (not 8.1) already preloaded on this device, the touchscreen came into it’s own, responding quickly and smoothly to the fat sausages that are my fingers. Even if you’d prefer to keep your fingers of the full HD 1920 x 1080 display, you can still appreciate the clarity, resolution. The viewing angles aren’t too bad too, in fact I’ve caught my neighbouring coffee drinker giving the screen many peeks out of the corner of his eyes. Perhaps he’ll read this. The only downside to this screen is that it is as reflective as your bathroom mirror; you’ll often find yourself angling the screen so as to not be blinded by a spotlight that’s being reflected of it. Speaking of angling the display, you can bend it back a cool 180 degrees and have it lay flat on the surface the laptop is placed on.
Audio
I’ll be honest: the S7 isn’t a boombox. The speakers are beneath the laptop and whether you’ll be able to hear anything largely depends on what surface your S7 is propped up on. I can testify that watching Batman: The Dark Knight rises while having the S7 resting on a pillow will leave you clueless as to what Bane is saying the majority of the time. Though, truth be told, I could barely understand Tom Hardy’s utterances with Dolby Surround Sound in an IMAX cinema during his tenure as Bane. To rectify this problem however is an audio jack located on the left side of the S7 into which you can plug a headset.
Battery
The 4680 mAh battery is suitable for the rudimentary tasks you’ll be using the S7 for, with an idle run time off about 6 hours. During my usage of the S7 I found that [insert hours] hours of casual use, which included buffering and watching 720p videos on YouTube in addition to Redditing brought the battery life from a 100% to 10% in about 4 hours, which is pretty decent. Selecting the battery saver mode on the laptop of course dramatically increases this threshold. However, 4 hours is still quite pitiful in this modern era so expect to be tethered to a nearby plug point when using the S7. Another issue I found on some occasions was that the S7 repeatedly turned off after a few minutes running on the battery, though all evidence seemed to point towards a defective battery rather than the laptop.
The Verdict
The downfall of this laptop is its battery life. As I mentioned above, 4 hours isn’t a lot and begs the question as to why you’d want to have an i7 processor anyway; you surely aren’t going to use this ultrabook to play intensive games or render videos with it. Regardless, in the end I found the Acer Aspire S7 to be a beauty, with it’s gorilla glass covered exterior and sleek finish. The S7 is excellent when it comes to tasks that don’t require the processor to run at full speed, thereby increasing the battery life, and as a result this is a great laptop to edit documents with or use for meetings.
