Acer Aspire S7 Windows 8 Ultrabook Review

Of all of the bits of review kit that I’ve had the pleasure of using, the Acer Aspire S7 is the one that has gathered me the most questions and comments. “That’s a thin laptop,” says the man on the train. “It’s the same thickness as my phone” says my girlfriend. Indeed, the very first thing you’ll notice about this ultrabook is its size – at just 12.3 mm, it’s svelte to the extreme, thinner even than the iconic MacBook Air and advertised by Acer as the thinnest Ultrabook ever.

But you can’t sell an Ultrabook on looks alone – although Acer have tried, with a fairly good ad featuring Megan Fox as a marine biologist. To be truly worth of its £1149 price tag, it needs to perform well too.

In this preview, we put a pre-production Acer Aspire S7 to the test. As it is an engineering sample produced in June, its configuration differs slightly from what will be available at retail and it is running a test version of Windows 8. For this reason, we won’t be examining hardware performance in any great depth. We’ll still give our first impressions of the ultrabook though, and will update with a full review as soon as we receive our retail unit.