Build Quality:
The laptop has a nice blue and silver color scheme going on, and for the most part it looks quite sleek and stylish. Obviously this depends on your tastes alone, but I've only met a few people who don't like the design. While the chassis is made of mainly plastic Acer has thankfully decided to opt out of shiny plastics, so the finish doesn't attract fingerprints (except for around the screen, that's still glossy plastic). One of the main problems I read about online as I was researching was that the palm rest and keyboard were very poor quality, but it seems fine to me. There is a little flex on the keyboard but I've seen much worse (dell notebooks). If you push down hard near the middle of the keyboard you get more flex than usual, but it's not to the point where I'm afraid the keyboard will break. I've typed this review on the keyboard and I'm doing pretty well (not as good as a mechanical keyboard, but still good). Keys are quiet, as are the touch pad buttons. The hinge feels strong out of the box, but I guess only time will tell if the quality holds up. The only qualm I have is that there is this small bit of rounded plastic on the bottom left that wiggles around a bit and makes a quiet hollow plastic noise. Maybe I can tighten a few screws to fix it.
Ports:
Standard display, with the inclusion of a USB 3.0 port, which will come in handy as faster flash drives begin to hit the market. I haven't tried any 3.0 devices on the port yet. HDMI and bluetooth are always nice, as well.
Hardware:
Seriously, for this price, what you get is amazing. After the Xbox deal, the laptop lands at around 600 dollars, and for that price, you get a dual-core sandy bridge processor, discrete GT 540m graphics, 4GB of DDR3 ram, and a 500GB (5400rpm...ugh) hard drive. The sandy bridge's quick sync feature is nice when transcoding video (I do quite a bit of that), and the discrete graphics is CUDA enabled, so it's even good for some light CAD modeling when I'm out and about. Battery lasts about 6.5 hours with medium brightness and wifi browsing, and probably about 3 hours when gaming. Speaking of gaming, you'll be able to play the latest games at native resolution at about medium quality. Older games should have no problem running on high. TF2 runs nicely on medium settings with 2xAA and 2xAS. I haven't had any problems with premature throttling, but it seems to be prevalent among other owners on forums, so look out for that.
Screen:
REFLECTIONS EVERYWHERE. It's a glossy screen, and it's average. Nowhere near an IPS panel or a MBP, but it's quite fine indoors. Outdoors...not so much.
Acer actually surprised me with this one. For 600 dollars you get a solidly built laptop with great specs. It's hard to find any other laptop which is 13.3" and under 800 dollars which has a sandy bridge processor, and discrete graphics. Asus has some, but they are more expensive and pack a weaker graphics card (520m). The first obvious comparison that comes to mind is the Macbook Pro, but with that 13" model, you're basically paying $600 extra, and losing the hard drive space upgrade and discrete graphics of any kind, which is vital for CAD or gaming. The MBP is even heavier. Obviously that extra money nets you a beautiful chassis and a nice screen, but the lack of discrete graphics is a major selling point for many people.
If you're looking for a cheap and light gaming and productivity laptop, give this laptop a try. If you can get past a fear of the Acer brand, you might be surprised.
