Acer have been pretty active lately with the release of
Windows 8 and the niche Ultrabook market. The S7 looks to stand out from the
crowd with a slick design and luxury features that make it a head turner.
Packs
quite the punch ey? Well it should because at $1900 you’re going to be expecting
some serious grunt from this machine. It does however feature a few extra
specials like a cleaning cloth for the display and a matching wireless mouse
(with batteries!). The packaging itself is also quite elegant with crafted
individual boxes slipping into their own aligned spaces with bits of material
to pull each one up. Premium product packaging for a premium product makes
sense doesn’t it?
Let’s
start but looking at the design. Its high glossy white, it’s thin and
expectantly lightweight. Opening the lid truly reveals the exquisiteness of the
slick design. Simplicity is key here and Acer has pulled it off very well.
There’s very little marketing stuff going on around the keyboard with an Intel
Core i7 sticker, the model of the laptop, Dolby theatre text and unnecessarily
‘Professionally Tuned’ on the right hand side. Seriously Acer, get rid of it
and the Dolby text (the Dolby text is also plastered next to the speakers on
the BOTTOM of the unit). Not many people care about things like that. Many
people are well aware of the quality of audio they are to expect coming out of
a 13” Ultrabook. Annoyingly Acer has once again opted to put the Power button
on the side of the unit which adds this tiny extrusion to what is otherwise a
slick looking machine.
The rest
of the unit is just as slick and continues the simple design throughout the
unit. The display is probably one of the biggest selling points on this unit.
Featuring a 13.3” Full HD Touch Display. There is a downside however. With a
13.3” display, the Full-HD resolution can make things appear pretty small on
the screen which can cause a few annoying issues for people who have not so
good eyes and people who have a chunky pointy finger (it is a touch screen
after all). The quality and performance of the screen however is pretty much
the best I have seen on a laptop. The colour saturation, black reproduction and
overall contrast of the display make your high definition photos and videos
just stand out that ever so better. It truly is a magnificent display.
The
performance of the laptop is equally impressive. With a 128GB SSD which
actually appears to be 2x 64GB’s in some sort of RAID setup (I’m assuming
either RAID1 or a proprietary RAID-like setup similar to MSI). It does however
seem to have worked. With SSD benchmarks providing average score of 350MB/s and
740MB/s Write and Read respectively. Those read speeds are absolutely
astonishing and is one of the most important part of an SSD, not the Write
speeds. Booting up the unit from a cold start comes in around 5-7 seconds which
is a definite eye turner for all those mobile workers.
Unlike
other Acer Ultrabooks I’ve tested this unit did not seem to have any issue with
playing back Full-HD MKV content. A few others caused lag and stuttering
throughout the vide whereas the S7 powered through with no issues and managed
to do an entire 90 minute feature film on battery with plenty of time
remaining. In fact the S7 managed to give me 4hrs of battery life including the
90 minutes of watching a movie full screen and about another 90 minutes
watching YouTube videos and other Flash related content (Flash media is
generally CPU intensive and great on draining batteries).
Gaming is
a miss with this laptop and so it should be as it isn’t designed to be used as
a mobile gamer. This laptop is a high performance machine for people who need
the power on the move.
Its thin,
its lightweight and features a full HD display ideal for professionals on the
go. If you need a superfast laptop with good internals this could be for you. With
a relatively hefty price tag, it is aimed at the higher end users.
sahin.s@centrecom.com.au |
          |
Monday, 3 December 2012
Acer Aspire S7
Wednesday, 31 October 2012
Acer Timeline Ultra M5
This is the Acer Timeline Ultra M5 and thanks to Acer I get
to have a closer look at it and see what it’s like. Not only am I looking at
the machine, but I also get to play around with Windows 8.
Let’s first take a look at what this M5 packs under its
hood.
Intel® Core™ i7-3517U
6GB DDR3 Memory 500GB Hard Drive nVidia GT 640M 15.6” LED LCD HD Display 2-in-1 Card Reader 1x USB2 port, 2x USB3 ports Ethernet Port HDMI Output DVDRW Drive
All this packed into a relative light thin and lightweight
unit. The casing of the laptop is made out of plastic so a lot of the light
weight does factor from that. It is classified as an Ultrabook although at
15.6” screen size it feels a little too big to called one. I prefer to see it
as a ultraportable laptop than an Ultrabook.
Looking at the unit with the lid closed we see a pretty
slick looking laptop. You’ll find the card reader and the DVD drive on either
side of the unit with all the ports on the back which is one of the downsides
of the unit. It is pretty unpractical to reach behind the laptop to plug in USB
devices. It also concerns me to see them at the back considering the fan
exhausts are located at the rear and all of the hot air gets pushed out next to
the USB ports. What I would like to have seen is the DVD drive be gone with and
the full array of ports to replace it. DVD drives are becoming less and less
used these days with almost every bit of content available for digital
purchasing and downloading.
Opening the lid reveals more of the simple elegance that
makes this laptop stand out. It is all the same material inside and out, it
doesn’t have a dozen stickers on the wrist rest area that makes it look like a children’s
book and it has one of the best looking backlit illuminations I’ve seen since
the Macbook Pro’s. The display area is fantastic as it has a black border
behind the actual glass area and around the physical display. This is an
underrated feature as a solid black or white colour around displays is proven
to improve the contrast of the screen from its surroundings, making anything
you watch or do appear that little bit extra visually compelling.
Performance of the laptop was equally impressive. Booting up
the unit came in at around 6-7 seconds thanks to the 20GB Cache SSD that acts
like your standard memory but instead caches the important files that help it
boot up and awake from sleep almost instantly. The keyboard is great to type on
and feels very soft and quiet. The track pad although is one of the better ones
I’ve used is pretty large and leaves no room for your wrist to rest on.
I ran a few benchmarking tests to see how the i7 and GT 640M
are going to be perform and it did remarkably well.
Unigine:
Score 703 Avg. FPS: 27.9
3DMark11
P1960
PCMark07
2908
Pretty decent scores to say the least and with gaming
benchmark scores like that is can easily be said that this laptop can used by a
moderate and casual gamer. However be careful with temps as the plastic casing
has terrible heat dissipation properties and the base of the unit can get hot.
A laptop like this coupled with a decent laptop cooler (Thermaltake Massive23)
would be a match made in heaven.
If you’re a non-gamer, don’t stress as this laptop has
plenty of juice for the office worker and business professional. With a decent
battery lasting well above standard laptops, portability and performance
capabilities of this laptop make it a great option for on-the-go business. The
full sized 15.6” display with sharp and crisp colours means you can present all
your work on something other than some of those smaller laptops with screens
less than 14 inches.
That’s the laptop, now I want to quickly go over Windows 8
for a bit. In the office here it was a bit of a mixed reaction. It was either
you didn’t like it at all, or you didn’t mind it at all. For me it was the
first. I felt the whole replacement of the Start menu was completely
unnecessary. The Start menu is now a bunch of tiles of your favourite apps.
What ticked me off the most was the requirement to sign up to a Microsoft account
to use things like the Calender! I’m sorry but that it is completely bonkers
and beyond stupid. It takes an extra step or two to do basic things and the
overall feel of it is no longer like using Windows. If users struggled to learn
Windows 7 and earlier operating systems, they are going to loath Windows 8. It
seems like Microsoft changed everything just because they had no other plan or
idea on what to do with the Windows operating system. It also looks a bit lazy
to see that they have created one operating system to work on multiple
platforms like Mobile and tablets. Windows 8 just did not cut it for me and I
will definitely not be making the switch to it.
The laptop on the other hand is fantastic! Its fast, its
slick, its portable and it looks good doing it! Acer really has surprised me
with this one and it is good to see! More information will be released as soon
as it is ready for public release. So if you’re looking for a laptop upgrade,
you may want to wait for this release.
sahin.s@centrecom.com.au |
           |
Tuesday, 30 October 2012
Samsung Slate PC Review
|
The Samsung Slate PC. Is it a tablet? Is it a desktop or is
it a laptop, well I’m going to find out and see just what can be made of such a
product. Powered by Windows 7 the Slate PC should be an interesting item to
review.
As always, let’s take a look at what’s under the tiny hood
of one of these units, and with this, it’s a fairly large list!
· OS: Genuine Windows 7 Professional
64-bit
· Processor: Intel Core i5 Processor 2467M
(1.60 GHz, 2.30 GHz Turbo, 3 MB L3 Cache)
· Memory: 4GB (DDR3)
· Display: 11.6" HD LED Display (1366
x 768), with Gorilla Glass & Wacom Digitizer
· Graphic Processor: Intel HD Graphics 3000
· Speaker: 1.6W Stereo Speaker (0.8W x 2)
· Integrated Camera: 2.0mp Web Camera
· HDD: 64GB (SSD)
· Wireless: 802.11 a/b/g/n (up to 300Mbps,
WiDi Support)
· Bluetooth: Bluetooth 3.0
· HDMI: Yes (Micro HDMI)
· Internal Mic: Yes
· USB: 1 x USB 2.0
· Multi Card Slot: Micro SD
· X-Dock Port: Yes
· Keyboard Type: Wireless Bluetooth Keyboard (Aluminium, 81Key) Slate PC
Dock Cradle (LAN, HDMI, 1x USB2.0, Headphone Jack, DC-in)
Loaded up with Windows 7 this device is marketed as being a
Slate PC which is kind of a place in between regular desktops and tablets. With
the dock and keyboard it becomes a touch PC and on its own it becomes the
tablet.
Don’t be fooled though, the tablet isn’t what you’d normally
be used to in regards to tablets. At 11.6” it is fairly large compared with
others and fairly pricey coming in at $1349 at time of writing this review.
With Windows 7 loaded onto the device users will find it
pretty easy to get used to. It acts like any other laptop or desktop you have,
simply load it up and install all your programs as you normally would. It
definitely adds a completely different perspective to how you use your
computer. Being able to touch the apps you have gotten used to over the use
with a mouse definitely refreshes your computing experience. On the subject of
touching, the display is pretty decent in terms of touch sensitivity however I
did notice at times it wasn’t precise as other tablets I’ve used. This is where
the stylus comes into play. Touching is fun and all but sometimes when you need
quick work done, the stylus is the way to go.
Performance wise the unit is relatively fast. With a Core i5
and a 64GB SSD the unit boots in under 10 seconds and is very responsive with
program usage. One of the let downs is video performance. With only the on
board graphics processor I found the unit stuttering and lagging while playing
a full-HD MKV file. This was a bit concerning as this tablet really is like a
multimedia device to hook up to a larger TV or device and for it to slightly under
perform with the simplest of tasks like video playback, is a bit concerning.
The unit gets recharged while sitting in its dock which also
features additional IO’s like an Ethernet port, HDMI and a USB port. The unit
does look strikingly elegant sitting in the dock and would suit almost any
study room or modern living space. Just take it off its dock and you’ll have
yourself a tablet running Windows 7!
As I mentioned earlier, graphical power isn’t the greatest
in this unit so gaming performance won’t be too hot shot. It has enough power
to run some basic games like Diablo III or even Counter Strike, just be
informed that FPS gaming and touch screens don’t work at all.
The Samsung Series 7 Slate PC is a feature packed hi-tech
piece of equipment. My problem with it is that it has a very niche market. It’s
not a tablet and it’s not a laptop which makes it sit awkwardly in between two
market leaders. The issue is that it is loaded with Windows 7, which can
complicate things. You see with a tablet, it’s pretty easy to just download
apps, and they’re ready to go, with this you need to manually install
everything like you would with a normal computer. When you’re on the go and on
the run, downloading apps seems much easier than installing software.
If you’re a businessman or businesswomen constantly on the
go and need a device to present to clients and aren’t happy with tablet
offerings and the unsupported program on tablets, then this is what you could
need.
sahin.s@centrecom.com.au |
             |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)