Acer Spin 7
LOOKS AND FEELS GREAT, BUT THE BATTERY LIFE IS A PROBLEM.
A NEW CONVERTIBLE with a great look and feel, Acer’s Spin 7 has a lot to recommend it. It’s light but built with a solid aluminium body and hinge that has just the right amount of stiffness, has a really great keyboard and capacious touchpad and a screen with excellent colour fidelity (though it could use a little more brightness). It performs well enough for a convertible and in spite of the passive cooling never got too hot to have in one’s lap.
There are also some solid specifications here. The Intel Core i7-7Y75 is a capable enough processor with a very high burst capacity (up to 3.6GHz), and with 8GB of memory, it provides a smooth experience for most activity in Windows 10. It has very fast wireless with 2 x 2 MIMO support as well as a pair of USB Type-C connectors, one of which supports DisplayPort screens. Thankfully, Acer also includes an HDMI and USB 3.0 adapter in the box, so you can still connect to your older peripherals.
If there’s a significant criticism we have of the convertible, it’s the battery life. It’s turned out to be significantly more limited than most of the competition, falling well below the average at just over four hours in PCMark. This is not a device where you want to be away from a power point for too long. Plus its matte-black metallic finish i sa massive fingerprint magnet, which gets grubby very quickly.
Still, it’s an overall very good solution from Acer. It’s not particularly flashy, just a device with a well rounded and thoughtful design. Recommended.