welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Aspire M from Acer this is part of a
refresh of Ultrabooks that are coming in at lower price points than the original
slew of Windows 8 touchscreen devices
that came out when Windows 8 launched so that means you're going to see a couple
of compromises that you didn't see on some of the launch products but again
it's well the benefit is that it comes in at a lower price point making a
Windows 8 touchscreen notebook more affordable to the general consumer so
Inside the Box we find a few different things so number one is we get a summary
of all the things that are great about the M5 our particular configuration has
4 gigs of RAM um a 500 gig hard drive
with a 20 gig SSD cach so there you go
we've got that in a number of different languages there we've also got a power
brick as with well pretty much all Ultrabooks although this one is
particularly slim uh as with all Ultrabooks the power brick is quite slim
so we'll do my trademark cell phone comparison so you guys can see the
overall thickness of the included power brick this is actually a very important
thing for notebooks for me anyway because the notebook itself can be as
portable and slim as it wants but at the end of the day if it's not if the
accessories that you have to carry around with it are bulky and heavy then
you're not really getting any benefit out of that light weight slim device
that you've just purchased so comes with a power brick next up inside we've got not a
whole lot there and aha some discs
permanent storage oh look at that that's cool so
it comes with an M disk if you guys aren't familiar with M disk it's well it
says what it is it's permanent storage so it's a recordable media that lasts
for over a thousand years or up to a thousand years or whatever long long uh
by the time you burn media to it and you'll be long dead by the time it
actually degrades in any meaningful way so uh that means that the drive included
with the Aspire m is also M disk compatible meaning it's manufactured by
LG So speaking of the optical disc I'd
like to show you guys yes this is an Ultra Book with an optical drive so if
you do need a DVD rewriter in your
portable notebook say for example you watch movies on DVD or whatever else
carried around with you this guy's good for about 5 hours of battery life with a
disc spinning in the drive or about 8 hours of General usage according to Acer
so that means you can actually take it with you on a flight and watch a couple
movies on DVD if you want to do that all of this while maintaining that Ultra
Book level of slimness in order to get that branding from
Intel also included inside is your traveler's warranty so this right here
actually has a couple things so it's got some quick sort of start guide how do I
access the charms menu how do I get to start for example it also has their
International Travelers warranty so it's a one-year international warranty I
personally think every notebook should have an international warranty but not
all of them necessarily do so if you take your notebook and travel to another
territory another country your warranty claim may actually get rejected by the
regional office because they're not the ones who sold you the notebook so Acer
make sure that that gets taken care of we've actually booted up the notebook
already and we are you know B basically
going to show you that yes it is indeed touch screen it's actually a 10o
multitouch so we're going to just oh yeah start menu doesn't do that anymore
see I always I always forget these things now so we'll go here and search
for paint which is my favorite
application to show off a 10-point multi-touch screen so just go ahead and
oh what' I do Acer photo okay apparently
comes with a photo management app let's go back here and go like that oo very
responsive actually nice you see how there's absolutely no delay following
around my finger that makes a very very very big difference to the touchcreen
experience so that's not necessarily true of every touchs screen that you
encounter so let's have a look at the device physically the hinge opens up
almost 180° looks like about 170° so I
mean this is just one of those usage scenarios that not everyone will encounter but I used to walk around on
campus and University and just hold my notebook like this and say type things
and browse the web and read things so I mean I know people have tablets now so
that's like not something people might do that much anymore but I do like it
when notebooks open up nice and wide like this um I had I had one notebook
that I found out that some of them are artificially limited I had a notebook
where it opened up about this about this far and then my baby came along and
pushed on it from the back put his full weight on it and it kind of went crack
and then it opened up 180° and it didn't break in any other sort of meaningful
way so I'm not recommending that you try that with your notebook but I do
appreciate that Acer provides this one stock with uh with a yeah with with a
hinge that opens up wide like that so the keyboard itself has a nice brushed
aluminum finish over the entire top piece here so this looks like one solid
piece of aluminum nice large touchpad it drives me crazy when manufacturers
include small touchpads with their notebooks uh it is a multi-touch
touchpad so you can zoom in you can zoom out you can do gestures in Windows 8
using it um keyboard itself has a little
bit of flex to it not not actually not bad so you're going to be able to type
fairly solidly on it they also haven't committed any cardinal sins on the
keyboard layout itself so you've got long shift Keys a long Enter key and a
very long backspace this I mean this is something that I can't emphasize enough
a notebook can be as solidly built and as beautiful as it wants but if it has a
keyboard that's not usable then thing's basically not usable in terms of IO
we've got a webcam on the front here on the left side we've just got that
optical drive so they probably had to clear a lot of room internally this is a
14-in chassis so uh it's got a 1366 X
768 screen if I didn't mention that already uh so it's a 14-in chassis which
means that about this much of the internals is taken up by that notebook
alone meaning that they had to sort of Reiger things a little bit so on the
front you find just a power button an indicator LED and then a Battery
Notifier you've also got an SD card reader on the right with a head phone
microphone combo Jack on the right as well wouldn't mind seeing those as
discret Jacks cuz not everyone necessarily has a headset that uses a
single Jack on the back you find exhaust power in two USB 3.0 ports as well as
HDMI out gigabit Ethernet and a Kensington lock one of those is a
charging capable usb3 Port which just means it outputs more current so you can
charge your tablet or whatever else you would want fairly quickly the back of
the device has again a kind of a a very
professional looking brushed aluminum finish to it with a simple Acer logo so
while this notebook may not sort of look any that different from what anyone else
is using it won't stand out as being an isore or anything like that so it's
compared to 799 machines that we've seen in the past it's a huge step up in terms
of not only the look but also just the overall build quality there's not a
whole lot of flex to the chassis itself and you can see that the way they've
designed the hinge is very robust here as well so they've actually got rather
than having the screen go all the way down to the hinge Point they've
separated a little bit here to make it in my estimation what they're probably
trying to do here is make it more resistant to Accidental drops if it were
to land on a corner it's going to be less likely to damage the actual screen
area so there's a bit of a plastic buffer around here that uh that should
actually help with that so on the bottom you don't find a whole lot you've just
got screws so you can remove the entire bottom plate if you need to get at
anything inside and then you've got a couple of ventilation holes here as well
as two stereo speakers and rubber points
here for making sure that it doesn't slip around while you are using
it so we're going to wrap up with a couple straightforward points all your
usual sort of hot Keys exist on the function keys themselves so you can
adjust your brightness you can adjust your volume uh Wireless all of that good
stuff you can also access most of these things through the charms menu these
days though so you can see brightness is just like that um here this is
something that should have come around on notebooks a long time ago but I'm
happy that it finally has and that is
backlit keyboard so the backlit keyboard on this notebook actually adjusts itself
for the ambient light that's around you and it uses an electroluminescent
backlight so that is just it's slightly different from an LED backlight it's
very bright and shines not only around the outside of the keys but also through
the letters themselves making it very very easy to see what you're doing in
the dark whether you're working you know on a plane where they've Turned the Lights Off or whatever else the case may
be uh spec wise it has a core i5 I don't believe I actually mentioned that before
and I think I made some notes for myself on the yep so the only other thing is
just clarifying what it means to have a 500 gig hard drive with a 20 gig SSD
cache um some people like I guess the
purists will say that that's not good enough but remember guys Intel's
Ultrabook spec requires fast wakeups so
I'm going to close the lid so I'm can put it in sleep and you're going to see
that what an SSD cach does is it gives you a lot of the responsiveness of an
SSD without the additional cost and it
allows you to have the capacity of a hard drive so it still wakes up nearly
instantly even though it doesn't have a full SSD thanks for checking out this
unboxing and first look at the Aspire M touch from Acer don't forget to
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