Review: Acer Aspire S3 ultrabook

The Acer S3 ultrabook. Photo / Supplied

The Acer Aspire S3 is the first notebook out of Intel's new ultrabook category, and it's a doozie.

Essentially the first laptop built to the company's new ultrabook specification, the S3 is wafer thin and, thanks to its dual core i5 CPU, hybrid mechanical/solid state hard drive and pots of bundled RAM, it's also pretty zippy. Add to this just over five hours of battery life and an extremely reasonable sticker price, the S3 is definitely worth checking out.

Having watched ARM processors power a growing number of tablets from the sidelines, Intel announced the ultrabook specification to create a new notebook genre that it is hoping will stimulate sales in the PC market like the netbook did over the last couple of years. The ultrabook specification looks pretty tasty, and this is largely thanks to some strict requirements Intel has set out - the devices can be no more than 21mm thin, have at least five hours battery life and use Intel's Rapid Start technology. In short, the chip giant wants ultrabooks to be light, fast and packing enough battery life to be truly portable.

Look and feel

In the looks department, the Aspire S3 definitely gains points. Finished in a combination of alloy and plastic, it has a brushed metal finish and curvy lines, all of which are pleasing to the eye.

Looks-wise, you'd be forgiven for mistaking the S3 for a MacBook Air. Not only is it just 12.9 mm thin, (which makes it as easy to slip into an envelope as Apple's anorexic Macbook Air), it also weighs a chiro-pleasing 1.3kg. It was so light that I had to check to see if its battery was attached (it was).

The S3's keyboard looks and feels similar to the Air's, although it isn't backlit. As with the Macbook the touchpad proved very usable, even with the right and left mouse buttons integrated into the trackpad. The S3's 13.3" display bordered on dazzling and delivered astonishingly accurate colour reproduction thanks to LED backlighting (which I suspect also helped the S3 achieve its impressive battery life).

What really did surprise was the S3's audio. Where most skinny notebooks tend to have thin, crappy and distorted audio, it delivered surprisingly rich sound thanks the baked-in Dolby Home Theatre audio enhancement. Taking the machine's slimline design, featherweight form-factor and slick input into account, the S3 has to be the ultimate no-compromise digital companion for anyone contemplating long-haul travel.

Features

One of the big challenges facing manufacturers looking to crank out ultra thin notebooks is connectivity, as USB, VGA or Ethernet ports tend to be thicker than the body of most qualifying devices. Acer has mitigated this challenge by incorporating a cleverly curved design to the S3's outer body, which lets it accommodate two USB 2.0 ports as well as an HDMI port plus an SD/MMC card reader slot and headset/mic jacks.

Under the hood, the S3 comes equipped with 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 as well as a 1.3-megapixel bezel-mounted webcam. Other connectivity options such as VGA and Ethernet ports and an optical drive are conspicuous by their absence, but this is fairly standard with such a wafer thin notebook PC design.

Where Acer has really come through is storage - Instead of using compact yet fast solid state drive, it has instead gone down the hybrid solid state/mechanical hard drive route. This is a clever move in that it allows Acer to offer a roomy drive without pushing the S3's price into the stratosphere. It's a 320GB drive, over double the SSD drive capacities typically offered.

Rounding things out, Acer has pre-installed a good selection of apps. These range from the genuinely useful (such as Microsoft Office Starter, plus a 60-day trial of McAfee internet Security), through to shovel-ware (the Kobo App, and Acer Games, plus a number of Acer utilities).

Performance

The S3's dual-core Intel Core i5 - the same ultra-low voltage CPU as used in the MacBook Air - is a great choice as it doesn't overhead and is easy on batteries. With 4GB of RAM on board, the S3 feels pretty zippy.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that like most ultra slim notebook PCs, the S3 wasn't deigned with gaming in mind. With on screen action powered by the Intel Core i5 processor's integrated graphics it certainly doesn't have the specs of a gaming rig. This said, at the ultrabook launch event, Intel had an S3 playing a workable version of Battlefield 3 (albeit with fairly low detail settings) which was a pleasant surprise (and a great demonstration of Intel's turbo boost real time CPU/GPU over-clocking).

According to the marketing bumpf, the S3 should also be able deliver up to seven hours of use away from a wall socket. Under real world conditions with a typical energy management setup and several apps running, I managed to get a still impressive five hours, 15 minutes, before it began to demand a wall-socket and went into standby.

All told, this is pretty impressive stuff considering its powered by a small 3-cell battery. Acer also claims that the S3 will go for a boggling 50 days of standby time, (which funnily enough I was unable to test conclusively). This said, its near-instant resume capabilities proved equally handy as did its sub-27 second start up time from a cold boot.

Verdict

The Acer Aspire S3 is the first ultrabook I've managed to get my hands on, and it definitely impressed. Where thin and ultra-lighteweight notebook PCs have traditionally been a compromise between portability and usability, Acer's Aspire S3 laughs in the face of tradition by managing to be extremely usable yet thin and light, making it the ideal no compromise companion.

Acer Aspire S3 ultrabook
$1,383

SPEC
CPU: Intel Core i5-2467M (1.6Ghz)
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium
RAM: 4 GB
Weight: 1.3Kg
Screen Size: 13.3"
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 3000
Storage: 320 GB mechanical/Solid state hybrid
Networking: 802.11n
Connectivity: 2x USB 2.0, HDMI