Acer Aspire M5 481PT: Review

With all these different types of Windows 8 computers, laptops, convertibles, clamshell, touch-screen, which do you want to buy? The Acer Aspire M5 is probably the safest bet. At only $729, the Aspire M5 still has some features Ultrabooks don't have: a 500GB hard drive and a DVD drive. The M5 also has a touch-screen, and it works just like a normal laptop with an excellent battery life.


The Aspire M5 is covered in a dark aluminum with a brushed metal effect, a lot like the Windows 7 version of the Aspire S7. 0.81 inches may not be mind blowing  but just remember that it includes a DVD drive, as well. At 4.4 pounds, it is slightly heavier than the standard weight of Ultrabooks, but it's lighter and a bit thinner than a typical midsize laptop.

For a cheaper price, you get a similar processor, hard drive, and screen resolution, more battery life, and a couple GB more of RAM. In fact, it is indeed far more affordable than the thinner and lighter Acer Aspire S7. The M5 is an excellent all-around computer, even if it doesn't have a dedicated Nvidia graphics card.

The Aspire M5 includes a large multitouch clickpad and chiclet-style keyboard, surrounded by aluminum. The upper lid feels pretty dimunitive, because at first glance you wouldn't have known its screen was a touchscreen until you landed a finger on it. Multi-touch capacitive gestures work very well on the touchscreen, finger contact is slick and precise, as if you were using an iPad. The screen resolution isn't "terrible," it's just not IPS. The quality of the picture, color, and brightness significantly deteriorates at extreme viewing angles. The lid also bends back almost 180 degrees, which allows you to get a more comfortable into a lap-friendly orientation.

The backlit keyboard is also quite comfortable; the keys have good travel and well-spaced, no keys are awkwardly misplaced or shaped. Speakers underneath the Aspire M5 have a decent sound quality so that you can enjoy a movie or stream music in a room. The speakers are decent, but not great.

The Acer Aspire M5 has dual USB 3.0 ports, HDMI, and of course, an Ethernet jack. With that is an SD card slot and headphone jack. There is also a tray-loading DVD drive on the left.

A third-generation Intel-core i5-3317U processor at 1.7 GHz packs quite a bit of power, helping you load and use Windows 8 applications zippy fast. The laptop has a 500GB hard drive, with a 20GB solid-state drive (SSD) cache for the application you use most frequently. And with 6GB of RAM (Random Access Memory), it's 2GB more than the typical-budget 4GB of RAM laptop.

Unfortunately, this laptop does not include Nvidia graphics, although the previous M5 model did. Adding the Nvidia graphics card would have completed the package completely, although the only type of person who would miss it would be a gamer.


The Acer Aspire M5 has an excellent battery life, lasting 6 hours and 2 minutes while playing back videos. Very few laptops in this category of laptops do better than the M5. Acer also includes a standard 1-year warranty.

Acer Aspire S7 Review: An Exceptional Ultrabook

When Acer first announced the S7 series, a series of touch-screen laptops, it was the company's first touch-screen ultrabook, and was easily the best-made by Acer. The previous S3 and S5 series were a bit boring design wise, while the S7 is made of aluminum with either a metal or Gorilla Glass lid, depending on which model you choose (11 or 13-inch).

The Aspire S7 has a 1080p IPS display, which looked very nice. With in a choice of an Intel Core i5 or an i7 processor and a RAID 0 SSD configuration, and you can easily achieve the fast performance on the S7 series. Does the $1,400 Acer ultrabook get enough things right to justify the starting price?

Made out of smooth glass, sharp edges, and cool aluminum, you can forget Acer's reputation for putting out laptops made of cheap plastic; the S7 is as nice to the touch as it is to look at, and is easily the best designed and tactile laptop the company has ever made. On both 11 and 13-inch models, the keyboard deck is fashioned out of smooth aluminum, with a large trackpad and keys.
                           
Though it looks like the screen of the S7 has a bezel, it's actually an edge-to-edge full glass display, with a border to match the white lid. The model with the white lid is the 13-inch model, and though its white surface can easily pick up fingerprints, it doesn't scratch.

At 2.86 pounds, the 13-inch version of the Aspire S7 weighs even less than the S5, which was also indeed very light for an ultrabook. The 13-inch model is thinner too-- (0.47-inch vs. 0.59-inch), which is an achievement, given that the S5 was once deemed the world's thinnest ultrabook. The Aspire S7 really does feel a lot slimmer and lighter than other competitive 13-inch ultrabooks.On the bottom of the S7, it is sealed in such a way that you cannot easily remove the cover to access the battery and its RAM. (This is normal for ultrabooks). At the bottom is where you will find the speaker strip, which is somewhat unusual, as most laptop speakers are located in the keyboard area or around the edges/sides.

As for ports, the Acer Aspire S7 offers almost everything that you would expect from a typical ultrabook -- 2 USB 3.0 ports, a 3.5 mm headphone jack and an SD reader. You can also get USB-to-Ethernet and micro-HDMI-to-VGA adapters.


Keyboard and Trackpad-
In any case, whatever considerations Acer had when designing its keyboard has finally paid off -- you could easily start typing at a rather brisk speed with very few typos, and when you happened to make a mistake, the largely sized Backspace key was easy to hit. The trackpad does a fine job at handling native Windows 8 gestures, but still isn't as good at single-finger navigation.

Display-
The S7's 1920x1080 HD IPS display is among the most lovely and aesthetic laptop displays, putting some other laptop's display to shame. You would probably think that 1366x768 is sufficient enough for a 13-inch screen, but once you use the S7, its kind of hard to turn back. Everything on the screen looks nice and crisp. Color reproduction is also very nice, blacks are deep, white are bright and colors aren't overly saturated.

The IPS technology displays incredible viewing angles. Unfortunately, you might encounter screen glare, because the S7 has a very glossy screen. The IPS display is also viewable almost edge-on, with the colors still looking potent on off-angles. The screen of the Aspire S7 can be pushed all the way back, so it is laid out completely flat.

Performance and Battery Life-
The Acer Aspire S7 runs on both Intel Core i5 or i7 processor which is plenty fast. The cooling fan, however, makes an annoying and loud fan noise. Like the S5, the S7 has two SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration, which gives it extreme read/write speeds. Acer claims the 4,680 mAh battery can last up to 6 hours, but in battery tests, it only lasted about 4 hours and 20 min.

Software-
Acer is not the only PC maker to do this, but it has definitely filled the S7 with a ton of bloatware. You'll find bloatware like 7digital, eBay, Skitch and Evernote, Acer Explorer, Encyclopedia Britannica, iCookBook, ChaCha, TuneIn, Amazon.com, Amazon Kindle, Netflix, StumbleUpon, newsXpresso, and a trial of McAfee Internet Security Suite. Wow. 
Like most other ultrabooks, the Acer Aspire S7 comes with a 1-year warranty.

Conclusion-
The Aspire S7, it's the best ultrabook Acer has ever released, with a stunning 1080p IPS display and incredible speed. Only one problem, though: Acer needs to improve the battery life. The S7 has a relatively short battery life compared to other touchscreen ultrabooks. If you don't mind carrying a charger wherever you bring the S7, this is one premium laptop. 


Review by © 2012 Andy Chin & Grant Han

© 2012 Acer Inc.