Quick look at Acer’s paper-thin Swift 7 laptop

LaptopMedia.com Punti salienti Quick look at Acer's paper-thin Swift 7 laptop

Da: Rossen Pandev 06 Ottobre 2016 / 10:47 0

Acer had a number of new devices presented in this year’s IFA in Berlin some of which are pretty innovative. The gaming Predator 21 X probably takes the cake but it’s a concept that we are yet to meet in reality in the next few months. And on contrary to the bulky gaming laptop, the company also unveiled what is believed to be the thinnest laptop currently on the market even beating HP’s Spectre 13 by a few millimeters, although the Swift 7 is an entirely different device.

You can check here when the device comes to the market: http://amzn.to/2duRRlr

Design

Obviously, the design is the key selling point of the device with all-aluminum construction with anodized finish. The lid, however, feels a bit soft imitating matte surface and unfortunately it’s a big fingerprint magnet.

Quite surprisingly for an ultra-thin device, the Swift 7 appears to be quite sturdy all around the outer shell with the small exception of the keyboard tray in the middle. It sinks in under pressure but it doesn’t actually affect the user’s experience during typing. Speaking of the keyboard, it delivers too short key travel and not enough prominent tactile feedback. It’s definitely something that we are going to see in almost every ultra-thin device from now on. On the other hand, the touchpad, which is untypical for the Acer style but retains the sturdiness and accuracy we are used to seeing in a number of laptops from the company, offers fairly good responsiveness with light key presses.

And now some impressive digits – the weight of the laptop is just 1.1 kg while the height is listed as 9.98 mm (including the Gorilla Glass 4 protection on the screen… impressive, isn’t it?), which is slightly less than the 10.4 mm Spectre 13. However, this doesn’t include the silicone legs because we measured the sides and they are slightly less than 10 mm thick without them. But that just nit-picking. Of course, this has lead to some design limitations, which are present in the Spectre 13 as well. The notebook carries only two USB-C ports and quite, unfortunately, they are both Gen 2, which means no docking station, no external display support unless you use a dongle.

Hardware

Spec-wise, the notebook is comparable to the Lenovo Yoga 900S and the ASUS ZenBook UX360CA while sitting between them in terms of pricing. Its starting price is listed as $999 which is slightly less than the Yoga 900S but considerably more than ASUS’ convertible. Nevertheless, both – the Yoga 900S and ZenBook Flip – haven’t received the much-needed Kaby Lake refresh just yet so if the newer hardware is of great importance to you, the Acer Swift 7 delivers.

The Swift 7 comes equipped with the latest Intel Core-Y processors (the re-branded Core m5 and Core m7 now the Core i5-7Y54 and i7-7Y75, respectively). The standard configuration of the laptop comes with 4GB of soldered LPDDR3 but you can order the 8GB version as well. The graphically-intensive tasks are taken care of the new Intel HD Graphics 615 while the storage options include only M.2 SATA SSDs up to 512GB. We will check if the device supports the NVMe standard as well but we don’t see why not. The choice of SATA SSDs as a standard configuration might be due to pricing reasons.

The whole system runs on a 41.58Wh battery and the OEM promises 9 hours of runtime during normal use. The Full HD IPS panel should be crisp enough for multimedia purposes and the Gorilla Glass 4 is a nice addition to the features.f

Specs sheet

The specs of the notebook might be changed until the official release but won’t be much different from the ones listed below

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CPU	Intel Core i5-7Y54 (2-core, 1.20 – 3.20 GHz, 4MB cache) / Intel Core i7-7Y75 (2-core, 1.30 – 3.60 GHz, 4MB cache)
RAM	up to 8GB (1x 8192MB) – LPDDR3, 1600 MHz
GPU	Intel HD Graphics 615
HDD/SSD	up to 512GB M.2 SATA SSD
Display	13.3-inch – 1920×1080 (Full HD) IPS, glossy
Optical drive	–
Connectivity	2×2 802.11ac Bluetooth 4.1
Features	2x USB-C (Gen 1, 5Gbps) combo audio jack (microphone/headset)
Battery	4-cell, 41.58Wh
Thickness	9.98 mm (0.39″)
Weight	1.1 kg (2.42 lbs)