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| Acer Aspire R |
I first knew somewhat about this when a review was published on this week's issue of Digital Life. On first impressions, it looks like an all-in-one that Acer is pretty famous for. So I did went and take a look and feel for a few minutes. And Acer did come up with something really crazy.
Specs
The Aspire R7 has specifications typically featured on a Low Voltage Sub-Notebook, like a 2-Core-4-Threaded Intel Core i5 3337U which was the model from Challenger or an i7 3537U. Not surprisingly, because of how new the concept is, they sport the last gen Ivy Bridge CPUs.
The screen is a 15.6 Inch Full HD IPS Panel. And in a Windows 8 Environment, it's touchscreen capable. But how the display is hinged comes is a large innovation. You can open it and make it look like a laptop. You can use the flexible hinge and you can bring the screen closer to you to make it like a mini all-in-one. It doesn't stop that, you can go through even further and close the laptop with the display facing up to make it look and operate like a tablet. A lot more so since the screen is touchscreen capable.
More information of the EZEL Hinge system is here:
http://www.acer.com/aspirer7/en_US/
The first few models of the Aspire R7 came with only the Intel HD 4000 Graphics. However the one I did come across was powered with a pretty beefy GPU in the form of the nVidia GT 750M; the fastest of the GT 700 series, not counting the GTX graded GPUs which you can check here.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-750M.90245.0.html
The Good
The Laptop is great to be adapted for many purposes thanks to its innovative swivel EZEL hinge system.
Something to consider is the 2.4 Kilo weight (excluding the AC Adapter). It's not really light but not exactly heavy either. It's not the slimmest laptop by any means of your imagination. However for a 15.6 Inch, its weight and thickness is still acceptable in my book.
Also the big statement on this configuration of the Acer Aspire R7 is the GPU, the nVidia GT 750M with 2 Gigs of Video Memory. A GPU of this caliber in a slim notebook like this will be handy for quite a casual on-the-road gamer. The GT 750M performs in league with the GTX 660M and the Radeon HD 6950M. To be honest, fitting a pretty slim 'Tablet' with a GPU like this is actually pretty fucking crazy and now you have the Graphics Horsepower to support your gaming needs. Plug an external gaming mouse and Keyboard and maybe perhaps a large TV via HDMI, and away you go.
The Bad
The main bad part: The Touch Pad. After I read from Digital Life, I did anticipate the out-of-place touchpad when I did touched it. And bringing the screen closer essentially blocks the use of the touchpad. For gaming and general purposes however, you would still want to use an external mouse anyway.
If not for the GPU and the SSD Caching, the hardware would have been just mediocre at best for gaming unless you back it with an SSD. The CPUs at low voltage would be considerably weaker than the normal full power ones like the I5 3210QM and the I7 3610QM / 3630QM.
At the size like this, it would also be nice to include a Number Pad to the keyboard.
And like most slim laptops and ultrabooks of the time, the Aspire R completely omits an optical drive bay which is a shame.
The Bottomline
This notebook is more than just a notebook. It can be a multipurpose large Tablet and a Mini Desktop all in one. The Touchpad replacement is a big set back to the product and the hardware is a bit entry level. However, with the GPU, the laptop can serve a wider scope of roles that it can fulfill, not just the office environment.
Rivals:
A Laptop / AIO / Pad thingy surely has no rivals. But compare spec for spec wise, some good notebooks from various companies like Samsung and HP would have portable laptop specs like this.
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