Acer has long been the poster child when it comes to the race to the bottom in consumer laptops. In the effort to get a laptop Acer Aspire one d150 akku into every home, prices had to come down and the easiest path for doing that was to cut corners. We’ve often lauded Acer’s products for being extremely affordable, but when it comes to overall impressions there are some concerns. These days, every big OEM has at least a few inexpensive laptops sitting on retail shelves, and they’re all basically the same: AMD Llano or Trinity APUs or an Intel Celeron/Pentium/Core i3/Core i5 CPU, 4GB RAM, 500GB hard drive, and a 1366×768 display. Wrap it all up in an injection molded plastic chassis and slap a $400 to $600 price tag on it, and you’re done. The problem is that you get what you pay for, and in this case what you often end up with is a laptop that will start to fall apart after a year or two of moderate use, not to mention the slow hard drive and lousy display.
As we approach the October 26 launch date of Windows 8, PC vendors have been giving us sneak previews of their products. Today we’re looking at Acer’s Acer Aspire one d250 akku lineup, which consists of a mix of touch-capable laptops and convertibles that straddle both notebook and tablet worlds.
We have previously seen some of these designs at Computex earlier this year, but we recently got a chance to try them in their near-final states. These PCs will be available from October 26.
The first Ultrabooks were all very thin, but the quality ranged from decent down to quite poor, with some experiencing cooling problems, overheating, noisy fans, and of course most came with bottom-of-the-barrel 1366×768 displays. The second generation designs weren’t a revolution, but at least we started to see a greater focus on improving the tangibles like the display and keyboard. Now that trend continues with Acer’s S7 Acer Aspire one d255 akku , which is the first Windows 8 Ultrabook to hit our labs. Did I mention that it’s super thin?
Leading the charge is a pair of Acer Aspire S7 Ultrabooks Acer Aspire one d260 akku , available in 11.6- and 13.3-inch models. It’s worth noting that Acer has been talking about making more premium products that command higher margins–the S7 certainly fits the case with a unibody aluminum chassis and ultra-sleek design.
A key distinguishing feature on the 13.3-inch S7 has to be its Gorilla Glass lid–HP may have done it first with the Envy 14 Spectre, but the implementation on the S7 is significantly thinner. We also liked how the glowing Acer logo on the lid corresponds to the actual screen brightness. Of course, we have no idea if this glass lid will stand up to a drop test.
When we look at the specifications for the S7, other than the nice 1080p IPS touch screen and the dimensions and weight, there’s not a whole lot to separate it from the pack. The base model comes with a Core i5-3317U processor, 4GB onboard memory, and a 128GB RAID 0 SSD set and comes with an MSRP of $1399. There’s an 11.6″ S7 as well that has the same specs but starts at $1199.
As for our test unit, it comes with a faster Core i7-3517U processor and a 256GB RAID 0 SSD set but otherwise has the same components and design as the less expensive offering. Besides double the storage capacity, the Core i7 processor comes with a base clock that’s 12% faster and a max turbo clock that’s 15% higher. The ULV CPUs are a potential bottleneck, so if you’re ready to spend $1400 then the extra $250 for more storage and a faster CPU is probably a reasonable upgrade—and thankfully, online pricing is about $100 less than the MSRP Acer Aspire one p531h akku .
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