Acer Aspire S7 unboxed, in the flesh

Launched in the Philippines back in October, the Acer Aspire S7 became the company’s 3rd-generation ultrabook running Windows 8. Since we can no longer wait for our turn to borrow a review unit, we decided to just buy one instead.

Acer Philippines was kind enough to give us a media discount so we got the 11-inch model. Having owned the first-generation Aspire S3, we’re excited how Acer has refined their R&D to design and develop the S7.

We actually first saw the Aspire S7 last June 2012 during Computex in Taiwan. It was one of the show-stoppers in Acer’s booth.

The package came with a lot of free accessories, the most in any ultrabook we’ve seen thru the years — a micro-HDMI to VGA adapter, USB-to-LAN adapter, a matching Bluetooth mouse and a docking station with an additional battery capacity of just over 3,000mAh. Acer claims this docking station and the built-in Li-Polymer battery has a combined life of 12 hours on a single full charge.

There’s also a dirty gray, stitched leather case that came in the box. Perhaps, our only disappointed here was that the matching white power cable/adapter is actually a bit big and bulky.

Nevertheless, we were pretty impressed that Acer had everything you need right out of the box so there’s no reason to buy additional accessories for the Aspire S7 (the whole set of accessories probably costs between Php10USD 0.17INR 14EUR 0.16CNY 1-12k if they were sold separately).

The S7 has a unibody design and uses aluminum on almost all corners, including the lid cover that comes with a diagonally crisscrossing pattern.

The front screen uses an edge-to-edge display panel which is protected by Gorilla Glass 2. The IPS display has a good tactile feel to it allowing for a comfortable touch experience with using Windows 8. The screen has a full HD 1080p resolution so the pixels are really packed together.

The one other unique feature of the Aspire S7 is a the microSD card reader. Most other 11-inch ultrabook don’t provide an SD card reader (normally afforded on the 13-inch variants).

Acer found a way to squeeze it into the thin frame by including a microSD slot (I normally use regular SD cards which I use to transfer files from my camera but for this one, I might use a microSD card with an SD card adapter for my point-and-shoot units).

We noticed that the keyboard, while slightly spaced apart and back-lit, has very little to no flex (meaning, the low height of each chiclet keys will force you to press down really hard to get a key response).

The hardware configuration is pretty much standard to ultrabooks although the inclusion of a full HD and touchscreen display does add up to the over-all value.

Acer Aspire S7 11.6″ specs:
11.6-inch IPS full HD LCD display @ 1920×1080 pixels
Intel Core i5-3317U 1.7GHz
Turbo Bost up to 2.6GHz
Intel HD 4000 graphics
4GB DDR3 RAM
128GB SSD
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth 4.0
micro-HDMI port
microSD card slot
Thunderbolt port
USB 3.0 port
Windows 8
4-cell Li-Ion battery

We’ll do a full review and share with you in a week or two.

Disclosure: We were given a handsome discount for the purchase of this unit