Review of Acer Aspire R7

First, let me share how I came to the decision to purchase the Aspire R7.

I recently decided it was time for a laptop upgrade. I have always had somewhat-beefy laptops, my last two being a Dell E1700 (17" screen) and MSI GT627 (15.6" screen, great graphics, blu-ray player, etc). I started looking along those same lines, and was seriously considering something from the Asus ROG line. I've always loved Asus products, and had I continued along that route, I'm sure that's what I would have purchased.

But then I started thinking about my laptop use these days. I don't generally play the latest and greatest games (I'm still playing Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 at present). I don't do advanced video editing; I have a desktop computer for that. I rarely need to read an optical disc of any type, and when I do, I'm at home where I have my laptop. It was starting to look more and more than I didn't need a beefy laptop this time. So, I started looking at Ultra Books.

Ultra Books intrigued me greatly, and I concluded that this was the route I wanted to go. However, I had 11" and 13" laptops many years ago, when those were the standard sizes. From my experience with a 17" laptop I knew that was too big, and that 13" was too small. I wanted to stick to a 15" screen. The convertible laptops intrigued me, but none came in higher than a 13.3" screen (I loved the Asus Taichi, but it was just too small). Then I stumbled across the Acer Aspire R7, and I was in love.

Now to the actual review.

First, the biggest negative I encountered. This is advertised as a "convertible laptop", but it really isn't. Sorry Acer, but you lost on that one. Although the screen will flip around, it does not lay entirely flat. In addition, because of the large screen size, the laptop has more weight to it than other convertible laptops, making it impracticable to use as a tablet.

The screen itself is gorgeous, and I will give it a perfect score. I have never been particularly interested in touch screens, and didn't really care either way on that particular feature. However, after getting this laptop, I have no desire whatsoever to ever go back to not having one. I rarely ever use the touchpad, and find the touch screen to be absolutely phenomenal.

This laptop has a different layout for the user input area. The keyboard is in the front, and the touchpad is in the rear. I thought this was a bit odd when I first saw it, but wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt. I tried it, and I love it. The design works, because of 2 other features - the very responsive touch screen, and the Ezel Hinge. I'll go into this further below.

The "Ezel Hinge" isn't exactly revolutionary, but I've never seen the concept implemented better. It's advertised with the ability to flip around, lay flat, and move forward. I have found the first two things here to be utterly useless, and have yet to find a use for either. Moving the screen forward, however, is something I never want to do without again. When you open the laptop, it is in a standard "laptop layout". However, you can then effortlessly move the screen forward, greatly closing the distance between it and you. I move mine so it's right behind the keyboard, completely covering the touchpad. Because of the fantastic touch screen I rarely use the touchpad, and this puts that touch screen right next to the keyboard, limiting arm movement back and forth. Overall, it's just great.

Storage on this laptop is pretty good. It comes with a 500G traditional platter hard drive, which is more than enough storage for most users. I keep a 2TB USB3 hard drive in my laptop case, just in case I need it; but I believe 95% of users will not need this. If this were the only hard drive, the laptop would take awhile to boot. Enter an MSATA 24G SSD drive! This is used transparently as a caching drive for the OS, and is extremely fast. What does this mean? Instead of taking 1 minute (or more) to boot like a traditional laptop, from the moment I hit the power button it takes 10 seconds to be booted and ready to log in. Many Ultra Books sacrifice storage capacity for speed, and install a single SSD drive. By using this dual method, you get the best of both worlds.

The video capabilities of this laptop are fair, but not great. It is, by a long shot, the most lacking area of this laptop. However, it does play last-gen games if you don't have the graphics way up. It is an Ultra Book, so I consider that a fair trade-off. It does have an HDMI output, which will work with most modern systems one might hook to.

Audio is incredible on this laptop. It has four speakers on the underside of the laptop, and they are louder than anything I've ever seen in a laptop (except for a Sony laptop I had many years ago, which had a large sub-woofer  that could hot-swap with the optical drive). These speakers are small, unobtrusive, and incredibly loud.

The battery life is great. With regular use, I get in the neighborhood of 5-6 hours of battery life from this; far better than any laptop I've ever had.

The keyboard is good, but I won't say great. They could have made the keys a little more sensitive for fast typers, and I find myself sometimes having to hit the space bar a couple times if I didn't get a solid hit the first time. It's not too bad though, and it's not bad enough for me to complain about any more than that. Due to the large screen size there is plenty of extra room on the sides, and it would have been nice if they could have included a numeric keypad. Again, not a huge issue, but it would have been nice.

The operating system is Windows 8. What can I say here? It's Windows 8, and unless you go Apple (or install Linux and such), it's what you're going to use. Personally, I find the Start Screen to be obnoxious and annoying, so I got rid of it. There is a great open source project on Sourceforge called "Classic Shell" which gives you back a start menu. I realize Microsoft is trying to come up with "new" and "better" designs, and I generally try to adapt with new technology. But while the Start Screen may be good for less-advanced users (it's great for my grandparents), those more advanced need something far more capable and efficient. For the time being, I'll stick to having a Start Menu.

The expandability is mostly what you'd expect from an Ultra Book. You can upgrade the RAM, and I don't see any reason you couldn't replace the platter or MSATA drives. It has two USB3 ports, and one USB2 port. One additional feature this has is a proprietary Acer port, which is identical to a mini DisplayPort, but uses their own protocol. The idea is that you can hook multiple connectors to that single port (DisplayPort, Ethernet, VGA), similar to what Apple is now doing. It's an interesting idea, but personally I think it's pretty stupid. I did purchase the VGA adapter for this, so that I can hook to older projectors. I purchased a USB ethernet adapter, which was cheaper and functions just as well. They don't even have an Acer-brand adapter for DisplayPort (yet anyway).

So those are my impressions of this laptop. My overall impression is "great", and I love this thing. It's bigger than your average Ultra Book, but that's precisely what I was looking for, so I'm good with that. It fills a void in the "convertible laptop" arena, without truly being one itself. At $900, I find it to be a pretty good deal, and believe I will be using this for some time to come.