Here at Computex 2023, Acer’s booth was filled with products that it announced just a couple of months prior, during its annual Next presentation. One such product is the new Swift Edge 16, the brand’s thin and light laptop.
I say new but to be fair, this Swift Edge 16 is a refresh but ultimately, it’s still an all-AMD machine, through and through. This year, the laptop is one of the first to be fitted with a Ryzen 7040U Series mobile CPU and more specifically, the range’s top-of-the-line Ryzen 7 7840U. It’s the mobile processor that comes integrated with AMD’s Radeon 780M integrated GPU, which is actually more impressive than it lets on.
Putting the Swift Edge 16 aside for a brief moment and addressing that last statement, I say that because – for all intents and purposes, and as a broad statement – it is the mobile processor that serves as the bedrock and template to the AMD Ryzen Z1 APU series that was designed especially for handheld gaming consoles, just like the ASUS ROG Ally. Of course, on the subject of gaming, I wouldn’t go so far as to running games at any resolution beyond Full HD.
Having said that and getting back on point, I obviously wasn’t able to spend a lot of time with the Swift Edge 16, but at the very least, I got a feel for it. Firstly, for a 16-incher, it is a deliciously light notebook. Even at 1.24kg, I can effortlessly swing it around and twirl it on my fingers, all thanks to the way the weight of the laptop is distributed.
Speaking of size, the Swift Edge 16 retains that gorgeous 16-inch 3.2K OLED display that absolutely blows up and makes the colours look so incredibly vivid but again, to be fair, that was only after I bumped up the screen’s brightness beyond 70%. Whites are pure white and not stained, while blacks are equally as deep, as they should be on a display of this calibre.
Then there is the keyboard and general typing experience with the Swift Edge 16. Then as now, it’s a full-sized keyboard, which means the numeric pad is present. Now, while I have been known to advocate for such a layout on laptops of similar sizes, the fact of the matter is that if you’re used to a tenkeyless keyboard, you’re going to undergo a learning curve coming over to this one.
By that, I mean that you are going to have to shift your typing position to the left, and honestly, I found myself making many typos on the Swift Edge 16 doing that, at least for the first five minutes. On a related note, the key travel of chiclet-style keyboard feels moderately shallow.
At the time of writing, I still haven’t gotten any word as to when the Acer Swift Edge 16 will be arriving on our shores but when it does, I am hoping the brand will be generous enough to provide me with a unit to review.
