Acer Aspire S7 review

With its sleek, ice white exterior and razor thin chassis, the Acer Aspire S7 is a beautifully designed Ultrabook. It stands little higher than 12mm tall when closed and weighs a paltry 1.3kg, making it perfect for mobile computing. Sadly, it’s a bit fiddly to open because the lip of the keyboard tray extends past the hard, moulded edges of the lid.

Its 13.3in touchscreen has a high 1,920×1,080 resolution, which means you can watch Full HD movies at their full resolution. The display’s colours were rich and vibrant in all of our solid-colour image tests. Contrast and brightness levels were also excellent, although we did notice a perceptible dark shadow running across the bottom of the screen, with the worst affected area being the bottom right-hand corner. It’s quite easy to spot in everyday use, too.

Our biggest gripe, however, was with the accuracy of the screen’s touch controls. Tasks that require a certain degree of precision, such as tapping individual files and managing internet tabs, can be difficult to perform.

The display’s glossy finish made it slightly reflective when we were working under bright lights or in direct sunlight. It’s not perfect, then, but at least we didn’t have any trouble finding a comfortable viewing angle thanks to its 180-degree screen tilt.

Sadly, we weren’t impressed by its keyboard. The Chiclet-style keys were well-spaced and had an LED backlight to illuminate them in poor light conditions, but had such little travel that it was almost like typing on a flat surface. This offered little to no tactile feedback, and the hard, sharp edges of the keyboard tray also dug into our wrists, making it difficult to type on the Aspire S7 after a long period of time. We also didn’t like the position of the Pg Up and Pg Dn keys (placed right above the left and right arrow keys) because we regularly hit them accidentally.

The all-in-one touchpad had its fair share of problems, too. It was accurate, but its smooth finish made moving the cursor across the screen more tiresome than it should be due to its lack of friction.

If you’d rather not have to deal with the touchpad, there’s always the option of using the bundled mouse, which connects to the Aspire S7 wirelessly via Bluetooth. It was a little small for our hands, but we certainly preferred using the mouse than the touchpad.

In terms of hardware, the Aspire S7 is relatively average. Its 128GB SSD boots Windows 8 very quickly, but its 1.7GHz Intel Core i5-3317U processor only managed a fairly average score of 42 overall in our multimedia benchmarks. This puts it on par with the Toshiba Satellite P845t-101, but when you consider the P845t-101 is roughly two-thirds of the price of the Aspire S7 it suddenly looks rather expensive.

It’s still fast enough to run common applications, but playing games isn’t the Aspire S7’s strong suit. Its graphics are provided by its shared Intel Graphics HD 4000 chipset, and while it just about managed 17.4fps in our Dirt Showdown test on High quality settings at a resolution of 1,280×720, we had to put the settings right down to Low to get anywhere near a more playable 30fps. Games on the Windows 8 Store worked fine, but we also noticed the fan was incredibly loud while we were running our graphics benchmarks.

Its battery life was even less impressive, as it only managed 4 hours and 11 minutes away from the mains in our light-use tests, and this was with the screen set to half brightness. This is far below what we expect from an Ultrabook, and the high portability of the Aspire S7 made it all the more disappointing.

With the Aspire S7 being so slim, there isn’t much room for connection ports. Even so, the Aspire S7 has two USB3 ports, an SD/MMC card reader, a Micro HDMI port and a combined headphone and microphone jack, as well as VGA and Ethernet adapters you can plug into the USB slots.

The Acer Aspire S7 is a beautiful laptop, but we think it costs too much for what you get. We could possibly overlook the price if typing on the keyboard wasn’t such an uncomfortable experience, but when the Dell XPS 12 offers everything the Aspire S7 does and more, and costs less, it’s difficult to recommend the Aspire S7 on looks alone.