The new Acer Spin 7 (SP71) laptop is a thin and light convertible notebook with a 14 inch touchscreen display, a 360-hinge, and pen support. The Windows laptop also one of the first PCs to be powered by a Qulcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 5G processor.
Among other things, that means you can expect long battery life, always-connected capabilities thanks to support for 5G mmWave and sub-6GHz networks, and… probably a bit of hit or miss performance when running Windows applications that may not be designed to run natively on computers with ARM processors.
That’s because while you can run some x86 apps on a Windows PC with an ARM-based processor, it takes a bit of extra processing power to emulate x86 architecture. But that shouldn’t be a problem if you’re comfortable sticking with native apps like the Edge web browser and Microsoft Office, which should run well.
Overall the key reasons to buy a Snapdragon-powered Windows PC like the Acer Spin 7 (SP71) are the long battery life and wireless capabilities. This notebook isn’t noticeably smaller or lighter than a model with an Intel or AMD processor. But Acer is promising multi-day battery life and the ability to connect to 5G networks with download speeds up to 7.5 Gbps. The computer can also connect to 4G LTE when 5G is not available.
The laptop has a magnesium alloy body and a layer of Antimicrobial Corning Gorilla Glass covering the display, as well as an antimicrobial coating on the keyboard and touchpad. The notebook measures 0.63 inches thick and weighs 3.1 pounds and features a full HD IPS touchscreen display with 100-percent sRGB color gamut.
It comes with a Wacom AES pen that supports 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity. When you’re not using the pen, it fits inside a slot in the computer.
