With a premium design and combination of metal and soft touch coating, the R7 looks and feels like a serious product from the moment it leaves its box.
Open it up and it can be used as a standard clamshell laptop, with one major difference.
In order to facilitate a variety of configurations Acer has reversed the traditional laptop design, putting the keyboard at the lower edge and the touchpad between it and the screen. This seems odd but has been done for a good reason.
This is the core feature of the R7, something Acer dubs an Ezel hinge.
The hinge allows for the R7 to be used in many different ways, and this configuration is Acer's attempt at making a more touch friendly laptop, with a physical keyboard and the screen close enough to navigate via touch.
In this configuration the touchpad goes unused, but from our initial time with the R7 you don't notice it as much as you'd expect.
The hinge is incredibly sturdy and allows for unusual configurations like this 'table' setup.
If you want to just watch videos, or use Windows 8 touch features exclusively, the screen can reverse in this way. One handy feature is that both the screen image and the speakers reorient themselves when you turn it around like this.
With a Core i7 and discreet Nvidia graphics, the R7 is a fully features laptop, with plenty of expandability and ports.
With a premium design and combination of metal and soft touch coating, the R7 looks and feels like a serious product from the moment it leaves its box.