Facebook Pixel Code

Acer Aspire R7: The notebook designed for touch

Acer R7 is well built, comes with a futuristic design and offers an impressive set of features.

We have already seen quite a few innovations happening in the smartphone segment, with display getting bigger but still the phone getting slimmer. Tablet sales have directly impacted sales of PC desktops and laptops mainly owing to deficiencies of Windows 8 operating system. All this has prompted vendors like Acer, Lenovo, Sony, Dell and HP to re-invent themselves and focus on something that is quite out of ordinary. Convertible

ultrabooks have been talked about in detail this year and now it is upto the manufacturers to make sure that they can think ahead of time and

offer viable futuristic products.

Acer introduced its sleek yet bulky looking Aspire R convertible this year and it is hard to ignore the resemblance with Star Trek spaceship that the device carries. Powered by Windows 8 touch optimised operating system, Aspire R7 sports full HD 15.6 inch display that stands out for its clarity, quality and functionality with touch support. The display is mounted on Acer patented Ezel hinge that allows the R7 to work in various forms; tablet and laptop with a bit of uber cool persona.

The design style of the R7 is quite a stunner and with an all-metallic body finish, this one is sturdy and bulky too at 2.4 kg. The aesthetics of the R7 makes you feel that Acer is looking at consumers with fetish for style and elegance and not so much focused on the portability of long-lasting product power. The mouse pad on the R7 has been strangely placed in the middle right above the keyboard and looks like it has been provided to users who are yet to acclimatise to touch-based display. You also get a touch pen with the R7 that comes in handy for users who are not used to operate display via touch. That said, we found using the pen quite cumbersome as basic functions like opening file do not operate smoothly.

While the laptop-with-keyboard mode is smooth and good experience, the same cannot be said for the tablet mode

usage. Firstly, with the display of 15.6 inch, the probability of using R7 as a tablet does not strike with us and looks like Acer has offered the option of tablet mode just from a design purpose and not so much with regards to functionality.

That said, there is enough power on the R7 packed with a 1.8 GHz dual-core Core i5 CPU, an 8 GB DDR3 RAM (expandable up to 12 GB), and a massive 500 GB storage space with the added inclusion of SD card slot. For a notebook-cum-tablet the audio output of the R7 is excellent and we can easily recommend you to watch movies on it without external speakers. There is a HD front camera for Skype chats which has become quite popular these days.

In terms of battery life, we got 2.5 hours from the R7 on Imtec Battery Mark, which is quite mediocre and strengthens our point of being a lifestyle product. The R7 scored P650 on 3D Mark 11 and with PC Mark 7 we got 2788. These are not the most impressive benchmark results and this clearly illustrates the obvious targeted users of the R7, those looking for a well packaged product, with good multimedia capability, host of connectivity options and not conducive for heavy usage.

With bold new features and a unique design form, Acer does seem to have a winner on hand.

Estimated street price Rs 79,999

Get live Share Market updates, Stock Market Quotes, and the latest India News and business news on Financial Express. Download the Financial Express App for the latest finance news.

First published on: 12-12-2013 at 03:25 IST
Market Data
Market Data
Today’s Most Popular Stories ×