Acer has just unveiled their Windows 8 lineup in an event held earlier today, and we managed to score some hands-on time with one of their top-tier notebooks at the event: the Aspire S7. The Aspire S7 comes in two flavors: 13.3-inch variant and a smaller, 11.6-inch version. The variant that we scored hands-on time with was the 11.6-inch variant of the Aspire S7 and boy was it pretty.
One of the first things that crossed our minds when we took the Aspire S7 from the reluctant hands of an Acer employee was just how thin and light the thing was. For the curious, the 11.6-inch Aspire S7 is only 11.9mm thin. The lack of apparent depth combined with the all-aluminium unibody chassis means that the Aspire S7 is one sexy looking ultrabook.
Like we mentioned before, the display of the Aspire S7 is touch-enabled, which was specifically made for Windows 8. The display is an 11.6-inch IPS deal, and has a native display resolution of 1920×1080. The display is protected from normal bumps and scrapes by Corning’s Gorilla Glass 2.
Checking under the hood, the Aspire S7 is powered by an Intel Core i5-3317U processor which pumps out about 1.7GHz of raw, number crunching power. That’s paired with 4GB of DDR3 memory, and a 128GB SSD that’s using RAID 0.
Using the Aspire S7 during our brief time with it was an overall pleasurable experience – it was quick, snappy and was quick to react to all the finger swipes we did on it. Browsing on the web is much, much easier when you have a display that’s capable of touch input, and we’re pretty confident that the included touchpad on the Aspire S7 isn’t going to get a lot of use because of the touchscreen display.
Unfortunately, Acer was a bit coy in revealing the exact pricing for the Aspire S7, but they did drop hints that this may fall at the 70K range, which makes it one of the most expensive ultrabooks around.