Acer Aspire S7 Super Thin Touchscreen Windows 8 Notebook Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,334 words · ~6 min read
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Welcome to yet another unboxing online detective. Today I do not have a camera
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person, but I can give you guys sort as
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an apology for me having to to sort of ghetto it today. I can give you guys a
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quick tour of the new NCIX TechTips
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filming studio. So, we've got a blue wall here, which will be the background
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for NCX Tech Tips. Got some power outlets and some network outlets. Got a
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green screen wall for all kinds of crazy cool stuff we might want to do with
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that. Got our cart that has our usual sort of knickknacks on it. Here's the
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pile of all of the stuff that was in the old tech tips room. And that pretty much
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concludes it today. I'm going to be having a look at the Acer Aspire S7.
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This is an extremely exciting notebook. It has Windows 8. It has a touchcreen
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and it is basically just awesome. So, here's the full specs. 11.6 in HD touch
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panel, LED LCD, HD graphics, 4,000, 4 gigs of RAM, a 256 gig SSD in this
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particular configuration of it. But what's most important about this
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notebook is the fact that it is so
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freaking small. Now, this isn't a proper retail box, so there's going to be some
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things potentially missing, like discs and warranty info and all that kind of
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stuff, but we can see the power brick. So, the power brick
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is there's my iPhone 4 comparison. A
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little bit thicker than an iPhone 4, a little bit smaller than an iPhone 4.
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Pretty reasonable size considering that this is a Core i3 machine. So, it's or
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excuse me, this is a Core i7 machine. And the form factor is just outstanding.
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Hold on. Let's just see if there's anything else in here that So, this is
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probably what the retail packaging will look like, but it will actually have stuff in it. So, now let's check out the
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machine itself. Now, it has just an awesome brushed. It almost looks like,
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okay, I I hate to use the word scratched, but it almost looks like it's
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got like an aluminum sort of um diamond
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pattern scratch in it. So, it's going at kind of diagonals here. I like two
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things about this. It looks really nice. And I like that if you accidentally
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scratch it, it will be more hidden than something like, say, for example, an iPad 2 where the aluminum is very plain,
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very flat looking. The hinge is very well constructed actually, especially
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considering the size. You've got your indicator LEDs here for charging as well
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as power. And there's another hinge right there. On the sides, IO is pretty
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simple. So, you got your micro SD slot, your headphone microphone jack, your USB
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3.0, and that's pretty much it on this side. On the back, you find some
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ventilation, lots of ventilation, as well as, check that out, micro HDMI.
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Very good stuff. On the other side, you got your power in. You got your power
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button and another super speed USB 3.0
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jack. At the front of the notebook, you find not a whole lot, just some Acer
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Aspires S7 branding. You can see the finish of this is just gorgeous. So, the
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whole top cover is aluminum. You've also got a handle there for opening it up.
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And then the bottom is just plastic, but
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it's a very clean, very nice looking, just white, plain plastic. You got
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speaker ports built into the bottom of the notebook. So, these will reflect up off of whatever hard surface you're on.
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If you're on a soft surface, then you're not going to have Oh, sorry. I was
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pointing at the Sorry, that those are the intakes for the ventilation. Uh
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speakers are here and here. So, you got stereo speakers and they're going to
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reflect off of whatever it is from the slight curvature of the notebook body.
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You can see you're going to get a little bit more sound sort of coming out this
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way. But, I wouldn't I mean, with anything in this form factor, I wouldn't expect the speakers to be like amazing
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or anything. Once we open it up, we find
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standard keyboard layout. We're going to find out how quickly it wakes up from
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actually I think is this in sleep? I guess we'll find out one way or the
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other. Yeah, it was in sleep. There you go. Or h not sure actually. All right.
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So, uh once we get inside, we find a chicklet type keyboard layout with no
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cardinal sins to speak of. So, we've got long shift keys, uh, enter key,
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actually, yeah, correct enter key, backspace, delete are actually pretty
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cleverly positioned. Long tab. Everything in here looks okay. If
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anything, they've shrunk some of the stuff that's stupid. Like, who uses the top of their enter key? And who wants to
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hit the caps lock key all the time? Not
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I. Uh, we're using like an edgetoedge
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like No, we're using it's using edgetoedge glass almost to the edge. So
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there's a little bit of aluminum here from sort of the unibody top and then it
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goes right to here. That's where the glass is. So that'll allow you to easily
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swipe in from the bottom or swipe in from the side. This is an engineering
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sample notebook. So actually some of the gestures aren't working correctly on it.
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So forgive me guys. This is not a finished product, but the actual one
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will work correctly for all of the gestures that you want to do. Screen is
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actually pretty darn good. So you've got reasonable viewing angles. It is glossy,
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so you do have to contend with that. here. This is probably going to be a better way to give you guys a look at
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it. So, there you go. Viewing angles are are quite excellent. If you come up
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here, you can still see it very, very well. And what I like most about this is
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the portability. It weighs almost nothing. So, here I never did show you
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guys my iPhone comparison for the thinnest of the overall notebook, which
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is just crazy tiny tiny thing. So, there
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that gives you some idea of the size of this notebook and then the thinness
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here. Check that out. out here. I got to I got to move it to the edge. You almost
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lose it in the uh in the cloth
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here. Very very thin, very light because
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of the aluminum plastic construction. Very solid feeling. So, I would actually
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use this with confidence like this because the hinge is quite
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sturdy. Like I wouldn't worry about it breaking or anything, which is usually
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the case on notebooks of this kind of size. And uh here is aluminum as well.
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So that's again what contributes to the sturdiness of the machine. Touchpad is
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reasonably sized actually. Here I'll do another another iPhone size comparison.
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Haha. Reasonably sized actually for a notebook of this size as well and the
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correct uh the correct aspect ratio for the 16x9 screen. So it's a 1366 x 768
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screen on there. I think that pretty much wraps it up. Thank you for checking
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out my unboxing and first look at the Acer Spire S7. It's kind of a lie
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calling this a first look because this is not the first time I've looked at it.
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I'm really excited about this notebook. I've been playing around with it a fair bit. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus
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Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.