Acer Aspire S7-392 Pro review

The Aspire S7-392 Pro is the business edition of Acer’s flagship Ultrabook, the S7. It comes with business-oriented features such as Windows 8 Pro, TPM and vPro security support, but doesn’t sacrifice looks to do so.

Apart from these extra features, the S7 Pro is almost identical to the ordinary S7. Its stunning ice-white chassis is beautifully designed, and its weight of 1.3kg and maximum height of 13mm makes it ideal for portable computing. As you’d expect, this doesn’t leave much room for ports round the laptop’s sides, but Acer has made good use of the available space, giving you two USB3 ports, one of which supports Sleep and Charge, an SD card reader, an HDMI video output, a combined headphone and microphone jack, and a proprietary port for Acer’s bundled VGA adaptor.

One major difference between the S7 and the S7 Pro is the hardware inside the laptop. The S7 Pro comes with one of Intel’s brand new Haswell processors instead of an older Ivy Bridge model, so it gets a boost in processing power, battery life and graphics performance.

This was certainly the case when we ran our multimedia benchmarks, as the S7 Pro’s 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-4200U processor and 4GB of RAM helped the S7 Pro score 47 in our multimedia benchmarks. This is four points ahead of last year’s consumer S7, and it did particularly well in the multitasking section of our test. This means the S7 Pro should be more than capable of handling several different applications at once, so it should have plenty of power for everyday office tasks.

The laptop’s integrated Intel HD Graphics 4400 chip also performed well in our Dirt Showdown test. On High quality settings at a 1,280×720 resolution, it produced a steady 21.7fps. The graphics processor isn’t powerful enough to play modern 3D games at the highest settings, but you can experience some acceptable average frame rates if you’re willing to sacrifice graphics detail and anti-aliasing. In fact, the S7-392 produced an average frame rate of 28.1fps in our Dirt Showdown benchmark at a resolution of 1,920×1,080, which isn’t bad for a non-gaming laptop.

A great feature of the S7-392’s i5-4200U processor is its low energy consumption, which helped the S7-392 last an impressive 10 hours and 52 minutes in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness. Last year’s Ivy Bridge-based S7 lasted just over four hours under the same conditions, so this is a huge improvement.

Sadly, the S7 Pro’s keyboard didn’t make it very easy to use for long periods of time. Its keys were well spaced, but their limited amount of travel and tactile feedback meant we had to be quite heavy-handed while we typed to make sure we hit the keys correctly. This was particularly true of the arrow keys, which sometimes didn’t work at all unless we hit the key squarely in the centre. Their small size and close proximity to the Pg Up and Pg Dn keys was also a little frustrating, as we repeatedly hit the wrong keys when trying to alter text in a Microsoft Word document.

There were a few absent keys from the keyboard layout as well, namely a row of function buttons. This isn’t too much of a loss, as the keyboard’s number keys double the function keys, but this means the next row of keys, the QWERTY keys, must double as Windows shortcut keys. This seems unnecessary when there’s so much space on the keyboard itself. We’d also have preferred a little more space for our palms, as our wrists kept catching the hard edge of the keyboard tray. This made the keyboard uncomfortable to type on for long periods of time.

Thankfully, the large and smooth all-in-one touchpad was much easier to use, and proved very responsive when we used it to navigate the desktop. Even better, the cursor didn’t move when we clicked the lower half of the touchpad to open files and icons, and multi-touch gestures and Windows 8 gestures worked perfectly.

Our main concern came from its 13.3in touchscreen. The screen’s 1,920×1,080 resolution was beautiful to behold, but we noticed a worrying amount of flex in the lid which affected the responsiveness of the touchscreen digitiser. The onscreen keyboard would repeatedly appear when we tilted the screen back, and sometimes our internet browser would open a page in our favourites bar unintentionally. This problem was both frustrating and unacceptable given the high price of the S7-392. We expect better from such an expensive system.

It’s a real shame, as the screen’s image quality was lovely. We recorded a rather average sRGB colour gamut score of 68.6 per cent, but the screen looked okay in our subjective tests. Reds, greens and blues were bright and vibrant, and whites were clean and uniform across the screen. Our black level reading of 0.45cd/m2 was also mediocre, but solid blacks looked deep and inky.

The screen’s contrast levels were good. We measured a contrast ratio of 865:1, and could see a high level of detail in most of our high contrast test images. Some of our night shots lost a bit of fine detail in the darkest areas of shadow, but on the whole images looked great.

The Acer Aspire S7 Pro certainly looks beautiful, but it has too many problems to justify the price. We’d hoped the keyboard might have improved from last year’s model, but it hasn’t, and the issue with the touchscreen is a whole new problem that makes the laptop less pleasant to use. If you need a smart business laptop, the HP Elitebook 840G1 is a much better buy.