Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing and first look at the aspire M from Acer this is part of a refresh of ultrabooks that are coming in at lower price points than the original slew of Windows 8 touchscreen devices that came out when Windows 8 launched so that means you're gonna see a couple of compromises that you didn't see on some of the launch products but again it's well a benefit is that it comes in at a lower price point making a Windows 8 touchscreen notebook more affordable to the general consumer so inside the box we find a few different things so number one is we get a summary of all the things that are great about the m5 our particular configuration has four gigs of ram a 500 gig hard drive with a 20 gig SSD cache so there you go we've got that in a number of different languages there we've also got a power brick as with well pretty much all ultra books although this one is particularly slim as with all ultra books the power brick is quite slim so we'll do my trademark cell phone comparison so you guys can see the overall thickness of the included power brick this is actually a very important thing for notebooks for me anyway because the notebook itself can be as portable and slim as it wants but at the end of the day if it's not if the accessories that you have to carry around with that are bulky and heavy then you're not really getting any benefit out of that lightweight slim device that you've just purchased so comes with a power brick next up inside we've got not a whole lot there and discs permanent storage oh look at that that's cool so it comes with an end disk if you guys aren't familiar with em discs it's well it says what it is it's permanent storage so it's a recordable media that lasts for over a thousand years or up to a thousand years or whatever long long that by the time you burn media to it and you'll be long dead by the time it actually degrades in any meaningful way so that means that the drive included with the aspire M is also M discs compatible meaning it's manufactured by LG so speaking of the optical disc I'd like to show you guys yes this is an ultrabook with an optical drive so if you do need a DVD rewriter in your portable notebook say for example you watch movies on DVD or whatever else you carried around with you this guy's good for about 5 hours of battery life with a disk spinning in the drive or about 8 hours of general usage according to a sir so that means you can actually take it with you on a flight and watch a couple movies on DVD if you want to do that all of this while maintaining that Ultrabook level of slimness in order to get that branding from Intel also included inside is your travelers warranty so this right here actually has a couple things so it's got some quick sort of start guides how do I access the charms menu how do I get to start for example it also has their international travelers warranty so it's a one-year international warranty I personally think every notebook should have an international warranty but not all of them necessarily do so if you take your notebook and travel to another territory another country your warranty claim may actually get rejected by the regional office because they're not the ones who sold you the notebook so Acer make sure that that gets taken care of we've actually booted up the notebook already and we are you know basically going to show you that yes it is indeed touchscreen it's actually a 10-point multi-touch so we're gonna just oh yeah Start menu doesn't do that anymore so I always I always forget these things now so we'll go here and search for paint which is my favorite application to show off a 10-point multi-touch screen so just go ahead and what I do Acer photo ok apparently comes with a photo management app let's go back here and go like that ooh very responsive actually nice you see how there's absolutely no delay following around my finger that makes a very very very big difference to the touchscreen experience so that's not necessarily true of every touchscreen that you encounter so let's have a look at the device physically the hinge opens up almost 180 degrees looks like about a hundred and seventy degrees so I mean this is just one of those usage scenarios that not everyone will encounter but I used to walk around on campus and university and just hold my notebook like this and type things and browse the web and read things so I mean I know people have tablets now so that's like not something would people might do that much anymore but I do like it when notebooks open up nice and wide like this I had at one notebook I found out that some of them are artificially limited I have a notebook where it opened up about this about this far and then my baby came along and pushed on it from the back put his full weight on it and it kind of went crack and then it opened up 180 degrees and it didn't break in any other sort of meaningful way so I'm not recommending that you try that with your notebook but I do appreciate that Acer provides this one stock with with a yeah with with a hinge that opens up wide like that so the keyboard itself has a nice brushed aluminum finish over the entire top piece here so this looks like one solid piece of aluminum nice large touchpad it drives me crazy when manufacturers include small touch pads with their notebooks it is a multi-touch touchpad so you can zoom in you can zoom out you can do gestures and Windows 8 using it keyboard itself has a little bit of flex to it not not actually not bad so you're gonna be able to type fairly solidly on it they also haven't committed any cardinal sins on the keyboard layout itself so you've got long shift keys a long Enter key and a very long backspace this I mean this is something that I can't emphasize enough a notebook can be as solidly built and as beautiful as it wants but if it has a keyboard that's not usable then things basically not usable in terms of i/o we've got a webcam on the front here on the left side we've just got that optical drive so they probably had to clear a lot of room internally this is a 14 inch chassis so it's got a 1366 by 768 screen if I didn't mention that already so it's a 14 inch chassis which means that about this much of the internals is taken up by that notebook alone meaning that they had to sort of rika Jigar things a little bit so on the front you find just a power button an indicator LED and then a battery notifier you've also got an SD card reader on the right with a headphone microphone combo jack on the right as well wouldn't mind seeing those as discreet Jack's because not everyone necessarily has a headset that uses a single jack on the back you find exhaust power in two USB 3.0 ports as well as HDMI out Gigabit Ethernet and the Kensington lock one of those is a charging capable USB 3 port which just means it outputs more current so you can charge your tablet or whatever else you would want fairly quickly the back of the device has again a kind of a very professional-looking brushed aluminum finish to it with a simple Acer logo so while this notebook may not sort of look and that different from what anyone else is using it won't stand out as being an eyesore anything like that is so it's compared to 799 machines that we've seen in the past it's a huge step up in terms of not only the look but also just the overall build quality there's not a whole lot of flex to the chassis itself and you can see that the way they've designed the hinge is very robust here as well so they've actually got rather than having the screen go all the way down to the hinge point they've separated a little bit here to make it in my estimation what they're probably trying to do here is make it more resistant to accidental drops if it were to land on a corner it's going to be less likely to damage the actual screen area so there's a bit of a plastic buffer around here that that should actually help with that so on the bottom you don't find a whole lot you've just got screws so you can remove the entire bottom plate if you need to get at anything inside and then you've got a couple of ventilation holes here as well as two stereo speakers and rubber points here for making sure that it doesn't slip around while you are using it so we're gonna wrap up with a couple straightforward points do all your usual sort of hotkeys exist on the function keys themselves so you can adjust your brightness you can adjust your volume Wireless all of that good stuff you can also access most of these things through the charms menu these days though so you can see brightness is just like that egg here this is something that should have come around on notebooks a long time ago but I'm happy that it finally has and that is backlit keyboard so the backlit keyboard on this notebook actually adjusts itself for the ambient light that's around you and it uses an electroluminescent backlight so that is just it's slightly different from an LED backlight it's very bright and shines not only around the outside of the keys but also through the letters themselves making it very very easy to see what you're doing in the dark whether you're working you know on a plane where they've turned the lights off or whatever else the case maybe spec wise it has a core i5 I don't believe I actually mentioned that before and I think I made some notes for myself on the yep so the only other thing is just clarifying what it means to have a 500 gig hard drive with a 20 gig SSD cache some people like I guess the purists will say that that's not good enough but remember guys Intel's Ultrabook spec requires fast wake ups so I'm gonna close the lid so I'm gonna put it in sleep and you're gonna see that what an SSD cache does is it gives you a lot of the responsiveness of an SSD without the additional cost and it allows you to have the capacity of a hard drive so it still wakes up nearly instantly even though it doesn't have a full SSD thanks for checking out this unboxing and first look at the aspire M touch from Acer don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos