Acer Aspire S7 Ultrabook Review

Acer Aspire S7 is beautifully crafted ultrabook that resembles the looks of MacBook Air. It is made of both plastic and metal. The bottom panel that curves up the sides is made of plastic, and whitened glass onto both sides of the lid. It gets an aluminium frame on the edges and an Acer logo is placed at the rear that lights up when the computer is on. The 13-inch full-HD display is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 2, which is quite crisp and bright. The Aspire S7’s display panel can be folded back a full 180 degrees till it lies flat. It includes just 0.3mm of key-travel distance keyboard that offers excellent typing experience.

The keyboard deck gets a complete metallic work that looks classy. For the first time Acer ditches entire row of function keys and merges them with the number row. The QWERTY row gets other important controls including Wi-Fi, sleep, multiple display control, mute, screen rotation, the keyboard backlight and the ability to disable the trackpad. The Del key replaces Windows and secondary right Alt key. The keyboard offers great typing experience with just 0.3mm of key placement though missing short-cuts and different button positioning can make typing a tad uncomfortable but that’s the cost of having such a thin body.

The touchpad is quite spacious and responsive. It works smoothly with Windows 8 gestures such as two-finger scrolling and pinch to zoom. Aspire S7 has two USB 3.0 ports, an SD card reader, a 3.5 mm headset jack, a power socket and button, a full-sized HDMI video output and port, that looks like miniDP, which connects the computer with a breakout dongle having full-sized Ethernet and VGA ports.

Great display: The 13-inch WQHD (2560×1440 pixels) display offers stunning visual experience. You can enjoy full HD quality videos with vivid colors. The bright display supports 10-point touch control, which is quite responsive. It packs Dolby Home Theater speakers offering boom but tiny sound. It has Dolby Digital Plus software that allows you to manage sound profile, but is unfortunately hidden in the desktop file explorer.

Superb performance: The slim and light laptop is a seamless performer that can easily handle multiple tasks simultaneously without any lag. The Aspire S7 has an Intel Core i5-4200U CPU, 4 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD. It is backed with Intel HD 4400 graphics chip with 128 MB of dedicated system memory, which makes it a decent graphics performer. Aspire S7 delivers flawless performance while running heavy apps and games. The Windows 8.1 powered S7 is one of the best choice for people looking for a high performance device which is lightweight and looks luxurious. The only issue is it heats up a little, but in comparison to other ultrabooks, it is cooler and quieter. In our bench mark testing it scored 836 on 3DMark 11and with PCMark 8 it scored 2260 that proves it is a good gaming laptop as well.

Battery performance: The Aspire S7 boasts a powerful 4-cell battery that can last for 6-7 hours on normal usage. In our battery test, it lasted for about 5 hours and 40 minutes while paying video with full brightness using Wi-Fi. In the battery mark test it lasted for about 3 hours and 10 minutes.