TechSmart 121, October 2013 TechSmart 132, September 2014 | Page 17

REVIEWS

Acer Aspire S7

T

he 1.3 kg Aspire S7 has been one of the
standout ultrabooks of the past few years,
proving to be a beautifully crafted machine
that pretty much tops anything we’ve ever seen
from Acer by a mile. It comes as no surprise then
that Acer decided not to change too much with
the S7’s 2014 iteration, but the changes they did
make enhance its appeal so much more.

A change for good
The biggest improvement can be seen on the
13.3” touchscreen, which now stands at a crisp,
luxurious 2560x1440 pixels. It’s overkill for
spreadsheets and Word documents, but blooms
when displaying full HD movies. Acer persisted
with the speakers strangely placed at the bottom
of the machine, and although loud, they are often
muffled and tinny. The Taiwanese manufacturer
must have taken the decision that it’s better not
to spoil the beautiful aluminium unibody design of
the panel around the backlit chiclet keyboard by
placing the speakers on top.
Luckily Acer came round to a full-sized HDMI port
on the side and not via an adaptor dongle like the
first iteration. You’ll also find two USB 3.0 ports, a
converter port (for an included dongle with LAN,

September 2014 | TechSmart

Acer pushes all the right buttons with its latest S7 model.
VGA and USB ports) and an SD card adaptor, although
the card protrudes instead of going all the way in.

Your power lies inside
As expected, the 2014 S7 comes
with the latest processor; an
Intel Core i7 4510U running at
2 GHz and a full 8 GB of RAM.
Multitasking is no problem, while
these also deal with large sized
photos more ably (256 GB SSD
storage provided). Ultimately the
new processor did not do that much
extra for battery life, and we received
four hours, although granted that
multitasking and a massive tab count are
common for us while working.

THE CHANGES ACER MADE
JUST ENHANCE THE APPEAL OF THE
ASPIRE S7 SO MUCH MORE.

After spending a lot of time with the machine, there is very
little to critique on the S7. It’s one of the more beautifu