One day into my review of Acer’s new ultraportable touchscreen laptop, the revised version of the Swift 7, and I’m impressed.
While it might be conservative in design, it sure is practical. It’s ridiculously lightweight; in the back of your bag or perched on your lap. It’s actually so light that you can hold it with a single outstretched arm.
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Internally, you’ll find an Intel Core i7-8500Y — one of Intel’s power-sipping chips — with 8GB of RAM and a 512GB NVMe SSD. I’ve noticed the machine ocassionally chirps as if a hard drive is spooling within it, but that’s not the case.
Even if it doesn’t have a physical drive, the SSD is strangely tardy for its interface, while 8GB of RAM seems decidedly meagre considering this machine’s price.
Still, the Intel chip is excellent. Using it on a plane, you’ll be rewarded with quick boot times and happy multitasking. It does stutter when loading multiple tabs on Firefox and Chrome, but its real trump card is its power usage.
I used this laptop — granted on Power Saver mode — for about three hours before, and three hours on a trip to Johannesburg. Windows reports a further 52% of juice is remaining. Switching it on as I edit this piece on Friday morning, Windows is reporting 46% of its battery capacity remaining. Note, this includes web browsing and document editing.
While there are a slew of positives with this machine, there’s one glaring negative: its touchpad. This particular unit refuses to let me type with my palms resting on it because the left-click will lock. This even without touching the touchpad itself. I’m not sure if this is a design feature or a design flaw, but the only way to reset it is to stop typing and forcibly left click it again.
Perhaps this is because the touchpad now extends twice as wide across the machine as most laptops. This isn’t really needed at all for a Windows machine. The clicks themselves aren’t reassuring enough to use reliably, so tapping the touchpad is the best way to use it too.
Nevertheless, this is day one of my review, so expect my opinions to change.
Feature image: Andy Walker/Memeburn
