Weight/size/battery: It’s not VERY light…definitely heavier than the Asus, but still a portable weight. It is very thin and compact as advertised. Mine has a 9 cell battery which does stick out and add significantly to the weight – the laptop doesn’t lie flat because the battery makes a little ledge. On the plus side, it probably helps keep the laptop cooler by allowing the heat to dissipate (btw the laptop does have good heat control), but the con is that if you do actually put the laptop on your lap it’s kind of annoying because it juts into your legs, but that’s a minor gripe. I haven’t tried to push the battery life limits, but I used the laptop on battery for about 4 hours with most of the battery indicator still full.

Build quality: It has a nice matte metal finish that doesn’t pick up fingerprints easily. The area around the keyboard is a shiny black plastic, but it doesn’t seem to pick up fingerprints either. (ETA: When I just touch the surfaces it doesn’t leave prints. But if I smear/slide my fingers on it, it’ll leave a mark. The cover will get printy, but the area around the trackpad won’t.) There is some flex in both the screen and the keyboard, but it doesn’t bother me because it’s not as if opening the laptop or typing will snap either in half. The screen is incredibly thin though, so I can see how some people could be worried about durability…but again, I don’t see how normal usage could possibly break it.

Screen: For me, the 14″ screen was a good compromise – not too bulky to schlep, but not too cramped for typing and watching movies either. I’m no graphics expert, but to me the colors and everything look fine. I’m not used to the aspect ratio though, so things appear more horizontally stretched out than I’m used to.

Keyboard: I like the way that the keys look – like flat rocks floating in space. Neither chiclet keys nor old school keys. They feel a little different and I will have to get used to it, but I can type with ease. They keys aren’t very quiet but nothing outrageous. There is no numberpad, but I like that they wrote a numberpad over existing keys that you can use if you push Fn. I don’t like that you need to use 2 hands to push Fn and the media keys to control your media though (i.e. play, stop, volume etc.). The Fn button is all the way on the left, and all the media control keys are all the way on the right so you can’t do things like pause your music with one hand. The key placement isn’t terribly intuitive either – volume up/down are on the arrow keys, while mute is up on F8. I wish the laptop had dedicated physical one-touch buttons for things like media control and wireless. Also, the arrow keys are about half the size of regular keys, which I don’t like. I’m just nitpicking though – the keyboard in general is adequately functional and easy to use.

Trackpad: The trackpad is comfortable to use – neither under nor oversensitive. The multi-touch gestures are easy and intuitive. The pinch gesture for zoom is the most useful to me because it’s not redundant. I don’t use horizontal flick ever because the screen is so wide it’s generally not necessary to scroll sideways. I don’t tend to use the 2 finger scroll either because I prefer to use the scroll area on the right side of the trackpad (and it’s a little ridiculous that there are 3 ways to scroll vertically on the trackpad – scroll area, 2 finger, spiral). If you do want to use the 2 finger scroll, be sure to keep your fingers far apart enough to register as 2 fingers. The right/left click buttons are just 1 single bar under the trackpad. They are easy to click, but I wish they were 2 separate buttons. The trackpad is off-center and aligned slightly to the left from the keyboard, so I often click too much in the middle when I want to left click, and have to slide my thumb to the left to complete the action, and then realign my hand back to the keyboard. I’m not even sure why it’s off-center, since this model doesn’t have a number pad, and it’s not even centered with the space bar. It’s slightly annoying, but something I’m sure I can adjust to quickly.

Speed: I had a 3.5 year old laptop with a Core 2 Duo processor, 4 GB of RAM, running Windows 7 before this one, with very mediocre speed. It would take a full minute to open firefox at startup, and sometimes decide that copy/pasting a paragraph of text was too much work and freeze. The new Asus I tried out also had these specs and was only mildly less mediocre in speed than my old laptop. This Acer laptop is much faster. I haven’t tried to run anything too crazy on it, but for simple multitasking (e.g. firefox + word + utorrent + gridrepublic) it worked really well. I haven’t found myself constantly waiting for things to open…at most a few seconds once in a while. For simple everyday student use, this laptop is speedy and frustration-free. For me the perfect mix of performance and portability – a desktop replacement that you can take anywhere.

Guts: I’m a fan of Windows 7. Came with junk stuff to uninstall though…but what doesn’t.

Webcam: It’s obviously not digital camera quality resolution, but it’s good for a webcam. I just wish there was a light indicator to show when it was on. The Acer Crystal Eye Webcam software was user-friendly and easy to figure out, unlike the software for my old HP’s webcam.

Multimedia: Can’t comment much on graphics because I haven’t played any crazy games etc. Watching stuff, everything looked fine. The sound is not fantastic, but pretty standard as laptops go. I wish the speakers were on the edge of the laptop though, so that you can close the laptop and still listen to music.

ETA: Here are some Windows Experience numbers from my computer for an objective measure of performance:

Processor: 6.8

Memory (RAM): 5.9

Graphics: 4.7

Gaming graphics: 5.1

Primary hard disk: 5.8

Hope my review was helpful! I didn’t include specs or technical things because you can just scroll up to Amazon’s description for that. Over all, I’d recommend this laptop to other commuter students. I’m very happy with my purchase. I’ll post updates if anything comes up.
Rating: 5 / 5

Overall though I am still giving this a 5 star review because of the fact that the price I paid today was great for what I am getting. It is perfect for what I need it for and I would definitely recommend it to a friend.

However, I have only had it for a few hours lol so if things change I will update this review.
Rating: 5 / 5