First look

Acer Aspire R13 first look

Acer’s Windows 10 hybrid has a crazy hinge that’s back from the dead

3 Sep 2015

Back in 2009 one of the first Windows 8 hybrids was the Acer R7-571 which had an unusual and very distinctive easel-like hinge with the screen mounted inside a frame in such a way that it could swivelled 360 degrees. Apart from showing up in a few competing Dell hybrids, that unusual easel-like hinge had disappeared. Until now.

The easel hinge makes a return in the Acer Aspire R13 under the brand name of Ezel Aero Hinge. As with older hybrids with such a hinge, it's certainly eye-catching although we're not sure it's any more convenient than a hybrid with a more conventional convertible or detachable mechanism as we can't see many practical advantages to this unusual mechanism.

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This Windows 10 convertible hybrid weighs 1.6 kg despite having a glossy back glass finish to the lid. The rest of the casing is made from a mixture of plastic and metal, but the pre-production R13s we saw at Acer's IFA stand were nonetheless reasonably sturdy.

The Aspire R13 will come with Intels' new Skylake processors, the option of two internal SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration as well as the new Thunderbolt 3 port which has a USB Type-C connector instead of the older Mini DisplayPort connector used by previous versions of Thunderbolt.

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The large keyboard felt well-made and comfortable to type on, while the touchpad is apparently an improvement over previous touchpads on Acer laptops as it's a Precision Touchpad'. This is a joint effort by Microsoft and laptop manufacturers to improve the quality of Windows laptop touchpads which had been, at best, merely middling in the recent past.