The Ultrabooks are here. This is a new category of ultraslim laptops introduced by Intel, that have characteristics more commonly found in tablets, such as a long battery life and instant resume from sleep. Unsurprisingly, with Intel throwing its weight behind it, the Ultrabook has been embraced by PC manufacturers.
Upside
The big thing about Ultrabooks is their slim, lightweight designs and the Acer Aspire S3 fulfills that with a heft of around 1.33kg and its thinnest point measuring 13mm. This is achieved by using a mixture of aluminum and magnesium alloy for the chassis. It has a dark grey look when compared with the aluminum-clad MacBook Air, but both laptops feel very similar when handled. This familiarity is further reinforced by the chiclet keyboard and a perfectly centered touchpad.Our review unit comes with an Intel Core i7 processor, a configuration that isn't available in the market yet. However, with the exception of the more powerful processor, everything else, such as the RAM and hard drive will be similar to what's selling in stores now. This means you'll get Intel integrated graphics, 4GB of RAM and a choice of either a 320GB HDD or a 240GB SSD. From what we know, Acer is the only vendor to offer a HDD option for its Ultrabooks.
Acer is claiming an instant resume of 1.5 seconds on the Aspire S3 and an Instant Connect technology that can restore your Wi-Fi connections on resuming from sleep. Both are features that should be on all Ultrabooks and even the HDD versions will benefit from this. This is thanks to a 20GB flash-based memory cache on the motherboard that will save the state of your operating system and allow for that speedy resume. In our test, it appeared to meet these claims, even though our unit is equipped with a HDD.
Like the MacBook Air, the Acer Aspire S3 uses a non-removable lithium-ion battery. Actual notebook uptime is touted to be seven hours, which would be excellent if accurate for its 3-cell battery. However, the S3 lasted only 4 hours and 37 minutes in our usual battery life test, where we looped a video, muted and without Wi-Fi. The HDD certainly didn't help here. Overall, it's decent, but not too impressive.
Downside
For those keeping track, Apple's Macbook Air, with its 1,440 x 900 screen resolution, does have the advantage over the 1,366 x 768-pixel panel on the S3. It's a minor quibble really since almost every PC vendor (except for Sony) offers 1,366 x 768-pixel displays for their 13-inch laptops. While the pixel density is lower on the S3, we believe that consumers are unlikely to notice this difference compared with more important aspects such as viewing angles and brightness.
In order to keep this laptop slim, the RAM modules are fused to the motherboard and cannot be upgraded manually. At least you'll get a decent 4GB of RAM, but users looking for a beefier configuration are out of luck. Also, flip the laptop over and you'll see the hard drive seemingly exposed. We have no idea if that's a deliberate design decision to allow users to upgrade the drive, or something Acer had to do to keep the S3 slim, but it felt secure enough.
There are no USB 3.0 ports on the Aspire S3, which is rather disappointing, as most new Windows laptops include at least one USB 3.0 port. Of course, all will be forgiven if Acer is planning a Thunderbolt port to replace those USB 2.0 ports in the next revision. Other ports present include a pair of USB 2.0, HDMI and an SD card reader. The bad news is that they are all located at the rear of the laptop, which makes it less convenient for users.
Outlook
A key idea behind the Ultrabook concept is its affordability, with Intel touting that these laptops will cost less than US$1,000. At S$1,598 (US$1,215) for the 240GB SSD-equipped Core i5 version, the S3 has exceeded this limit by a significant amount. While this is still more affordable than a similarly configured MacBook Air (S$1,688), we were expecting a more attractive price. This would imply that SSD-equipped Ultrabooks from other manufacturers will find it difficult to go below Intel's US$1,000 target. If that's indeed the case, Ultrabooks won't be the runaway hit that Intel is hoping for.Source: Cnet Asia
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