Make no mistake; the Acer Aspire S7 has nothing in common with the netbooks of yesteryear that brought Acer temporary fame and fortune. The S7 is a member of their high line of Ultrabooks and it looks and feels every bit the part. The S7 is available in 11.6" and 13.3" models, and the 11.6" has a solid aluminum alloy lid while the 13" model has a white glass lid. We take a look at the Acer Aspire S7-191, the 11.6" model here. Both models have a 1920 x 1080 capacitive touchscreen with 178 degree viewing angles. The S7-191 11.6" model is priced at $1,199 and it comes with a clip-on secondary 3 cell battery, case, VGA adapter, USB to Ethernet adapter and a Bluetooth mouse.

The Ultrabook has two USB 3.0 ports (one charging), micro HDMI, 3.5mm audio and a microSD card slot. VGA and Ethernet are provided via the included dongle adapters. It has dual band Atheros WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, a 1.3MP webcam and Intel HD 4000 graphics. Since it doesn't use Intel WiFi there's no WiDi wireless display. The Aspire S7 ships with Windows 8 64 bit Home Premium.

This is a lovely looking machine with metal on all top surfaces and an EL backlit keyboard that works well. It's insanely compact (not much bigger than an iPad or Android 10" tablet) and it's less than a half inch thick. At 2.3 pounds, it's almost as light as some Windows 8 Core i5 tablets on the market, and you'll hardly notice it in your bag. It feels and looks like a high quality product with no flex and it's put together perfectly. We did however note that the side edges where the top metal keyboard deck meets the curvy undersides feels a bit abrupt. Acer says the entire body is made of metal, but that curvy bottom panel feels and looks like plastic, though it gets cold to the touch like metal. Unlike the 13.3" Aspire S7, the display doesn't open completely flat to 180 degrees, but honestly I've never found a reason to use a laptop in that position. The display tilts back far enough for normal use.

The island style keyboard has little travel since the machine is so exquisitely thin, but the layout and size are good. We quickly adjusted to the low travel and were typing at our normal rates, though it continued to feel a bit jarring to the fingers. The EL backlighting glows white with a faint blue tint, and it offers surprisingly decent contrast against the silver keys. The Elan trackpad's multi-touch gestures were hit and miss, but we weren't bothered hugely since we prefer using the touchscreen for side-swipe gestures and zooming. But for those that frequently rely on the trackpad and particularly multi-touch gestures, the S7 isn't the best we've experienced on a Windows 8 machines.

When you cram 1920 x 1080 into an 11.6" panel, things get mighty tiny on the Windows desktop side, and surprisingly our machine shipped without the usual DPI scaling to 125 or 150% that makes text and icons larger and easier to see. You can of course set scaling to suit your visual acuity, and to Acer's credit, the glossy IPS panel is bright and extremely sharp, making even small text unexpectedly legible. Viewing angles are wide, colors are vibrant and contrast is excellent: this is a very good display. Touch is responsive, in fact a bit more so compared to some of the slightly numb touch screens we've used on other Windows 8 touch screen laptops--Acer did a great job here.

The S7 runs on an Intel Core i5 ULV CPU. When it first came out it had the usual 1.7GHz i5-3317U, and Acer has just incremented that to the 1.8GHz Core i5-3337U for a very modest speed bump. There is no i7 option. It has 4 gigs of dual channel DDR3 RAM soldered to the motherboard and a 128 gig fast SSD drive in a RAID 0 configuration. It's as quick as any Intel Core Ultrabook on the market, even though it's significantly smaller and lighter.

As with other Ultrabooks, it's more than capable of handling daily productivity, email and social networking plus photo editing and casual video editing. Since it has Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics, it's not meant to be a gaming machine, though casual games run fine and some current 3D games that have Intel integrated graphics optimizations play decently at lower resolutions and quality settings. If you do play 3D games, you'll hear the fan, which can get surprisingly loud for a little laptop. In less stressful productivity use and for streaming video playback, the fan cycles on and off and is audible though it never roars. Acer's Ultrabook cooling designs are supposed to be engineered for low noise, but in general we find them very effective at cooling but not nearly whisper quiet. Despite the metal casing, the Acer S7 gets warm but not burning hot.

The internal 3990 mAh battery only lasted us 3.5 hours on a charge, but with the 6.6 ounce external battery clipped on, the Ultrabook ran for 5 hours unplugged in a mix of productivity and light multimedia tasks. Those are short runtimes for an Ultrabook with a power-frugal ULV (ultra low voltage) CPU and integrated graphics. We blame the extremely small and slim design and light weight: these qualities simply don't allow for beefy internal batteries.

The HP Spectre x360 runs on Intel Broadwell 5th generation Intel Core i5 and i7 CPUs with 4 or 8 gigs of RAM and a 128, 256 or 512 gig SSD. The $999 model has a 2.2 GHz Core i5, 8 gigs of RAM and a 256 gig SSD, which we consider the sweet spot in terms of value and future-proofing ($100 to double RAM and SSD storage from the base model is a sweet deal). We look at the $1,149 model with the 2.4 GHz Intel Core i7-5500U, 8 gigs of RAM and a 256 gig SSD. There's a $1,349 model that moves up to a 512 gig SSD and WQHD 2560 x 1440 IPS display. All models have dual band Intel 7265 AC WiFi 802.11ac with MIMO, Bluetooth 4.0, a backlit keyboard and 720p webcam. This 2-in-1 is one of the slimmer rotating hinge convertibles at 15.9mm at the thickest point and weight is reasonable but not impressive at 3.26 lbs. (the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro is just 2.6 lbs.). The notebook has 3 USB 3.0 ports, full size HDMI, a mini DisplayPort, a deep SD card slot (cards don't stick out) and a 3.5mm combo audio jack.

Design and Ergonomics

The Spectre looks distinctly HP and Spectre-like. HP loves light colored aluminum surfaces with soft, friendly edges and their sunken keyboard with chicklet keys is a constant design element. The extra-large trackpad that we've seen on a few Envy and Spectre models is here too, minus the Control Zones from the HP Spectre 13 (a lovely but mind-bogglingly short-lived Ultrabook model). The unibody design is perfect with no visible seams or rough edges. The laptop tapers back to front, and the front and side edges are straight cut polished aluminum that reminds us of the also extremely attractive Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus series. From the front edge, you might mistake the Spectre x360 for the soon to be released 12" MacBook, and that's certainly not a bad thing, nor can you say HP copied Apple since their model came out first.

The back edge of both bottom casing and display panel are rounded, which makes for a unique and stunning look where you see two precision made half circles of metal stacked when the laptop is closed. The 360 degree hinges are firm and questionably finished in chrome (it's a little jarring on the eyes). HP uses a multi-gear hinge inside so the display is firm in a variety of positions, yet it's not too hard to move. As with other 360 degree rotating convertibles, you can use the Ultrabook as a laptop or tablet, or you can put it in presentation and tent modes. At 13.3" and 3.26 lbs. it's obviously not meant to be used like an iPad, but the variety of positions or a handy desk mean it can still be easily used in non-laptop modes. For reasons that escape us, HP doesn't mention the fact that the Spectre x360 (both resolutions) have a Synaptics active digitizer that works with HP's Active Pen/ Stylus. That makes the convertible particularly interesting to note takers, artists and Photoshop jockeys. We tested it with the HP pen (the same pen sold for the HP Envy Split) and it worked fine (see our pen video below). The Spectre's bottom firing stereo speakers are quite loud and full, particularly after you adjust the Dolby audio software to your liking (we like movie mode best).

Display

We think 1920 x 1080 is the perfect resolution for a 13.3" Windows laptop. If you have sharp eyes, you can use it without scaling to avoid desktop programs' menus and dialogs looking too tiny or fuzzy, and desktop games behave as intended. The IPS display is quite sharp, very bright at 335 nits and it has excellent color gamut that matches competing machines at the same price point. This is a truly lovely looking display that calibrates well for those who need a portable that can handle professional photo and video editing. The glass is bonded to the display for more immediate looking text, richer colors and in theory less glare, though the Spectre x360 still has plenty of glare. HP's high-end laptop displays are some of the most reflective on the market, alas. The display supports 10 points of touch as well, and we found it slightly less sensitive to a light touch and HP's pen compared to some other models (I found the Dell Active Stylus model 750-AAGN to be very good in terms of required pen pressure compared to HP's pen). There's no problem with touch or Synaptics pens, but if you're used to a super-sensitive Samsung Galaxy or Nokia Lumia phone, this will feel more like the iPhone 6 in terms of sensitivity. For those who really want a higher resolution display, HP's top of the line model ships with an IPS 2560 x 1440 WQHD display.

HP might not use ergonomically sculpted keys like Lenovo and Dell, and they may have faltered occasionally in the past with keyboards (some older Envy models had springboards for keyboards), but this keyboard is excellent and quite similar to the Spectre 13 keyboard. It has a fairly deep 1.5mm key travel for a very slim Ultrabook and nicely damped keys. It's not overly noisy and there's no keyboard deck bounce or trampolining. Keys are in their normal places and the top row handles both multimedia and Fn key functions. We loved that though multimedia controls are the default, the laptop knows common key combos like Alt-F4 to close a window and we didn't have to hit the Fn button in addition to use the key combo. When keyboard backlighting is turned off, the LED on that control key stays illuminated in bright white, which some folks might find annoying (get out the duct tape!). Less annoying is the mute key that lights amber to let you know the notebook's audio is muted. The keyboard has only one backlight level and it illuminates all keys evenly with white LEDs. The white letter backlight disappears into the silver metal key caps under dim lighting. It's fine with backlight off in well-lit environments like an office, and it works fine with backlight on in extremely dim to unlit rooms, but that gray area in between is murky.

Lately we've reviewed several notebooks that use only Microsoft drivers (part of Microsoft's take back the trackpad drivers initiative, especially for MS Signature Edition models sold by MicrosoftStore.com). The HP wears its Synaptics trackpad control panel with pride, and for those who like to customize all sorts of features or reverse two finger scrolling direction, it's a joy. The trackpad is well behaved (HP and Synaptics do good work together), and the glass surface feels just right--not too slippery or too grabby. Swipes, taps and multi-finger gestures work reliably. We found the seriously oversized trackpad to serve no usability purpose (it's as big as an iPhone 6!), but it didn't get in our way except when right-clicking (the right click point is really far to the right)

Horsepower and Performance

HP and Microsoft worked together on the Spectre x360 to tune the system for better performance and battery life. It shows in boot times that are quick even compared to other SSD-based laptops--it boots so quickly we thought it was resuming from sleep. HP didn't load the machine with bloatware, which for HP is... unusual. Benchmark numbers are good, though honestly we generally see little variation among Ultrabooks with very similar specs. Cooling and fan noise are well handled without excessive thermal throttling, and the fan is tuned nicely (it's not shrill like the tiny fans in some Ultrabooks). The bottom is conductive aluminum so it will get warm when the machine is working hard, but it never got burning hot. The fan is audible when playing demanding 3D games like Skyrim, but it doesn't sound like a vacuum cleaner.

The laptop is available with dual core Intel Core i5 and i7 CPUs. Like all Ultrabooks, these are U series ULV 15 watt CPUs designed for 13 to 15 inch slim and light machines. Since the Core i5 and i7 share the same architecture and number of cores and threads, you won't see a huge performance jump with the Core i7. The Spectre's 15 watt CPU is considerably faster than the Intel Core M used in the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro, HP Envy x2 13t, Asus Zenbook UX305 and 12" MacBook. It's the same CPU used in the Dell XPS 13 (2015) and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 3rd gen. It has Intel HD 5500 graphics that show some improvement in terms of performance over the previous generation HD 4400, while the 5th gen CPUs show little performance gain (Intel's intent here was to improve battery life rather than performance). The Spectre x360 is perfectly capable as a main machine and it can handle Photoshop, 1080p video streaming, casual 1080p video editing and export, MS Office, software coding for school and more. If you're looking for a gaming rig, Ultrabooks aren't the ideal choice since they lack powerful dedicated graphics. Likewise if you need a CAD workstation, this isn't it.

As with most Ultrabooks, RAM is soldered on board and not upgradable, while the WiFi/Bluetooth card and SSD are socketed. The SSD is user replaceable and it's a standard gum stick shaped SSD with an M.2 connector and a SATA interface (sorry, no PCIe interface here for you specs mavens). The bottom panel is easy to remove for upgrades and service: simply unscrew the torx T5 screws and remove the bottom aluminum cover (note that 2 screws are longer, so remember where they go).

The Spectre X360's 56 Wh battery is a bit higher capacity than the 45-50 Wh 13" Ultrabook average, and HP claims an optimistic 12 hours for the full HD model (10.5 for the WQHD 2560 x 1440 model). It ships with a standard laptop design 45 watt charger that's tiny and comes with plenty of cord. In our real life tests using the laptop for web browsing with 5-10 tabs open, working in MS Office, streaming an hour of House of Cards in 1080p via Netflix, watching several short YouTube videos, editing 10 RAW files in Photoshop CC and playing music in the background while working for one hour with WiFi on and brightness set to 50%, our Core i7 model averaged 9 hours. That's a respectable number for a 13" Windows laptop, and only the non-touch full HD Dell XPS 13 and the MacBook Air beat it among Intel Core i portables.

For those of you who've been crushing on the old Surface models but knew Windows RT wouldn't cut it, or on the Surface Pro line but found it beyond your budget, the 1.37 lb. Surface 3 is certainly worth a look. It's the quickest Intel Atom tablet or netbook to date, and it's perfectly adequate for modest to moderate tasks like MS Office, email, streaming YouTube and Netflix full HD video and even occasional bouts with Photoshop and Windows Movie Maker (full HD video export will require some patience if you're movie is longer than a few minutes). The build quality, unique design and display are what you'd expect from Surface: excellent. That doesn't mean there aren't any concessions. The display is smaller than Surface Pro 3 (10.8" vs. 12") and the resolution is a little lower which is fair since the display is smaller. The kickstand doesn't have infinite positions and instead has 4 angles that it can lock to (2 fairly upright for laptop style use, a reclined angle for writing and closed for tablet use).

The vapor Magnesium casing is rigid, seamless and solid. The light silver finish is nice enough looking, and as with previous Surfaces, there's one full size USB port, a mini DisplayPort and 3.5mm audio. Unlike other Surface models it doesn't use the magnetic charging connector, instead it uses the same micro USB charging port as most Windows and Android tablets (this is a charging-only port; it doesn't handle USB data transfer). There's a microSD card slot under the kickstand, just like other Surface models. The Intel Atom doesn't require a cooling fan, so the Surface 3 is always silent, unlike the Pro models. The back gets warm but not burning hot, so it's not uncomfortable to hold. The stereo speakers with Dolby are reasonably loud and full for a 10.8" slate and are a definite improvement over the first gen Surface models.

The optional $130 Surface 3 Type Cover is available in a variety of colors and it has the same suede-like back that acts as a cover when carrying the device. You can fold it backward behind the tablet if you don't need it, or simply detach it. It uses the usual Surface strong magnets and has a little ridge that allows you to angle the keyboard for a better typing angle, just like the bigger Surface Pro Type Cover. The keys are backlit with several brightness levels controllable from the Fn row, and they are moving keys rather than the capacitive keys used on the Touch Covers. At 10.8", you can't expect a wide and capacious keyboard, but it's certainly tactile and usable. I prefer the Pro Cover for its larger size and slightly deeper feel for key travel, but it's obviously too big to mate cleanly with the smaller Surface 3.

The Surface 3 uses the same N-Trig active digitizer technology and pen as Surface Pro 3 (Microsoft recently bought N-Trig). Unlike the Pro 3, the Surface 3 doesn't come with the pen in the box; you'll have to buy it separately for $50. It's available in several different colors to match the Type Cover offerings and it's interchangeable with Pro 3 pens (but not Pro or Pro 2 that used Wacom digitizers and pens). The pen is every bit as good on Surface 3 as it is on Pro 3, and it offers the same palm rejection so you can rest your hand on the screen while you write and it has 256 levels of pressure sensitivity for more natural drawing. We noticed a bit more pen latency on the Surface 3 when drawing very quickly, likely because the slower CPU can't keep up quite as well as the Core i3, i5 and i7 CPUs in the Pro model. It's not bad by any means, but artists will notice while note takers won't.

Microsoft matches the Surface Pro 3's excellent qualities in the less expensive Surface 3, with only the resolution dropping a little--and that's fair since the screen is 1.2" smaller. The 1920 x 1280 ClearType HD Plus panel has the same 3:2 aspect ratio to make the tablet less ungainly to use in portrait mode. The display is very bright at 430 nits max and you can completely disable auto-brightness if you wish (we found it did a good job though). Color saturation is very good on the IPS panel and color gamut matches Surface Pro 3 and other high-end tablets and Ultrabooks with 98% of sRGB coverage and 74% of Adobe RGB. Color calibration is reasonably good out of the box, so you'll see the proper colors without fiddling with calibration. Contrast is good and text looks sharp. Microsoft ships the tablet with 150% scaling as default, and that makes for reasonably sized desktop icons and readable text that's not too fuzzy.

The Surface 3 runs on the latest generation 1.6 GHz Intel Atom X7 Z8700 Cherry Trail processor with 4 cores and 4 threads. It has Turbo Boost to 2.4 GHz and is coupled with gen 8 Intel HD integrated graphics. Atom, like the Intel Core line of CPUs, evolves slowly these days in terms of performance boost, but the X7 feels faster than the outgoing Bay Trail Atom line. That said, we have the $599 model with 4 gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of solid-state storage. 4 gigs is the base configuration for current laptops and it allows for smoother multitasking compared to the $499 model's 2 gigs of RAM. With 2 gigs of RAM, you'll want to stick to two programs running at a time or you'll be hitting virtual memory, which is slower than RAM. Though the machine has solid-state storage, it's the slower eMMC kind that Atom's stuck with, and it's akin to an internal MMC or SD card. Ultrabooks and laptops use a faster SATA or PCIe interface, and those are several times faster than eMMC.

What does that mean? For most folks the 10.8" Surface 3 is a second machine that can handle productivity tasks, photo viewing and video playback. If you spend many hours per week editing video, compiling code or working in CAD applications, you'll want a faster machine than Surface 3. Likewise, if you're a heavy multitasker who keeps 10 tabs open in a web browser and runs 4-5 programs concurrently, this isn't the tablet-laptop hybrid for you. It will slow down at that level of multitasking, compiling fairly large programs will take some time as will full HD video transition edits and encoding for export. CAD will be slow. MS Office 365 runs great, and you get a 1 year subscription with the tablet. Photoshop CC runs decently even when editing RAW files from a dSLR, and 1080p video playback on-screen or output via mini DisplayPort works flawlessly. Windows Live Tile Metro games play fine since they're optimized for lower power devices like Atom tablets, but this isn't for Battlefield 4 or Far Cry 4... even Civ V is slow since it's heavy on the CPU for turn calculations.

You'd think the Surface 3 would have appreciably longer battery life than its Pro counterpart given the lower power CPU and fanless design. However, we found that both the Surface 3 and our Surface Pro 3 with a Core i5 managed the same 7 hours with brightness at 40% and WiFi on. Every time Microsoft released a Pro model, battery life wasn't quite all there and firmware updates improved battery life. Perhaps the same thing will happen with Surface 3, but we have no insider info to that effect.

The tablet ships with a compact 13 watt micro USB charger that's 5.2v and 2.5 amps (a little higher than the usual 2 watt tablet charger). The Surface 3 takes an eternity to charge while you're using it. If the tablet is turned off, then it will charge in 3 to 4 hours, which isn't that bad. But if you're using the tablet while it's charging, it takes 7 hours. Ouch.

The Surface 3 has dual band Intel WiFi 802.11ac, and once again Microsoft went with a Marvell Avastar wireless card. WiFi worked well in our tests on an 802.11ac network with Linksys and Netgear Nighthawk access points. The tablet also has Bluetooth 4.0 that you can use for headphones, keyboards and anything else you'd use with a Windows machine (remember, this is full Windows, so you can install any program or driver that you'd install on a laptop). Microsoft says an LTE 4G model is forthcoming, though we don't have pricing or a date yet.