Acer Aspire R7-571 review

We’ve tested plenty of touchscreen laptops in recent months, but the Acer Aspire R7-571 is quite unlike anything else we’ve seen before. Not only is the keyboard located below the touchpad, but the screen’s unique “Ezel” hinge gives it an unprecedented amount of flexibility. It can pivot 180 degrees like the Dell XPS 12, lie almost completely flat like the Sony VAIO Duo 13, hover parallel to the keyboard if you want to use the laptop standing up or you can move it forward to make the touchscreen more accessible.

It’s a clever piece of design, and the Aspire R7-571 is clearly designed to make the touchscreen as user-friendly as possible. However, we were more impressed by how sturdy it is between transitions. Pivots can be performed with just one finger, but you’ll need both hands to move the screen back and forth over the touchpad. The screen doesn’t wobble from side to side either, even when it’s lying parallel to the keyboard. The R7-571’s screen rotation was spot-on too, so we were never left with the Windows desktop facing the wrong way after we’d moved it from one position to another.

You don’t have to use the touchscreen, though, as the R7 also comes with a stylus and wireless mouse. This will be welcome news for those who want to keep messy fingerprints to a minimum. You don’t need to worry about scratching the screen with the stylus either, as the tip is encased in a small plastic disc. We thought this might make it difficult to use, but we were able to draw pictures and navigate the desktop without any problems. We can see it getting lost, though, as there’s nowhere to slot it into the chassis.

The bright 15.6in display is stunning. The touchscreen has a sharp 1,920×1,080 resolution and full 10-point touch support, making it a pleasure to use. We could execute Windows 8 gestures and multi-touch gestures with ease, and it was both accurate and responsive when tapping through icons and individual files on the desktop.

The R7-571 has the image quality to match, as our colour calibrator showed it was displaying 90.9 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut. This is great for a laptop screen. Colours were rich and vibrant, and the screen’s glossy finish really made them jump out of the screen. Blacks were incredibly deep, which supported our low black level reading of 0.26cd/m2. Whites were bright and uniform across the screen. The R7-571’s viewing angles were fantastic too, and we could see the screen clearly from a variety of positions.

We recorded a contrast ratio of 1,188:1 with our colour calibrator, which is significantly higher than other high-end laptops we’ve tested, and all of our high contrast test photos showed plenty of detail in the both the light and dark areas of the screen.

The R7-571’s keys comfortable to type on. They’re noisy compared to other keyboards we’ve tested, but they’re well-spaced and provide plenty of tactile feedback. The large all-in-one touchpad took a little getting used to, as it’s positioned above the keyboard. If you’re sitting back in your chair you have to stretch further to reach it, but its smooth surface was very responsive. We’ve never seen such fluid pinch-zooming, but it took a few attempts to display the Charms bar and switch between windows.

The R7-571 is powered by a 1.8GHz Intel Core i5-3337U processor that can Turbo Boost to 2.7GHz when there’s enough thermal headroom. Paired with 8GB of RAM, it scored a respectable 45 in our multimedia benchmarks. This is one of the fastest scores we’ve seen from this type of processor, putting it on par with the Samsung Series 7 Ultra. This is more than enough power for everyday tasks and it has the speed to tackle more demanding programs that benefit from multithreading.

You can even play 3D games on the R7-571 as long as you’re willing to compromise on resolution and graphics quality. The R7-571 produced an average frame rate of 19.7fps in our Dirt Showdown test on High quality and a resolution of 1,280×720. That isn’t smooth enough for comfortable play, but it produced a much smoother 40.1fps when we disabled anti-aliasing and set graphics quality to Low. This means you shouldn’t have too much trouble with older 3D games or 2D titles from the Windows 8 Store.

We were also pleased with R7-571’s battery life. It lasted 6 hours and 7 minutes in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness, which is what we expect from this type of laptop.

The R7-571 has a good range of connection ports. There are three USB ports, two of which are USB3, an HDMI output for connecting the laptop to an external display, an SD card reader, a combined headphone and microphone jack and a volume rocker. There’s also a port for the supplied VGA and Gigabit Ethernet adapters.

The Acer Aspire R7-571 is a great laptop with a fantastic design. It’s by far one of the most innovative laptops we’ve seen this year. It strikes the perfect balance between powerful hardware and fun, touch-focused design. It’s one of our favourite hybrids.