The Aspire S3 is Acer's first foray into the world of the ultrabook.
It aims to offer enough of a kick to get through all your computing
needs without taking up space in your backpack.
Our model came
packing an Intel Core i7 processor, 4GB of RAM and a 240GB Solid state
drive. Annoyingly, that configuration won't be available. Instead, you
can get either an Intel Core i7 model with a 500GB hard disk drive or an
Intel Core i5 model with a 240GB SSD. They'll cost you £899 and £1,099
respectively.
Good
- Slim design
- Sturdy build quality
- Comfortable keyboard
Bad
- No USB 3.0
- Awkward port placement
- Top processor option only available with a HDD
- Screen resolution not as high as competition
And the Ultrabooks have arrived! We just got word that the Acer Aspire S3 will go on sale in the US and Canada this week for $899 -- making it the first pinch-thin, MacBook Air competitor to hit the market, landing ahead of competing models from Toshiba, Lenovo and ASUS. To recap, this 2.98-pound aluminum beaut has a 13.3-inch (1366 x 768) panel, is rated for six hours (or 50 standby days!) of battery life and promises to wake from sleep in a mere two seconds. For the money, you'll get an ultra low voltage Core i5 CPU, 4GB of RAM and 20GB of solid-state storage combined with a 320GB HDD. No word yet on how many additional configs will be available, though Acer did confirm that this $899 version will be followed by models with Core i3 and i7 processors and beefier storage capacity. Intrigued? Have a gander at our hands-on preview if you missed it the first time around, and find some fancy press shots below.
Design and build quality
The Acer Aspire S3 is immediately recognisable as part of the
ultrabook crowd, due mainly to its super-thin design. At only 16mm thick
at its thickest point, it's certainly svelte; with a width of 321mm and
a depth of 217mm, it will easily slide into a backpack or an attractive
leather briefcase without putting up any kind of fuss.
The Acer S3 is an ultrabook, and ultrabook means thin -- it's even skinnier than an iPhone at its thinnest edge.
It's about as wide as Apple's 13-inch MacBook Air
-- give or take a millimetre -- but it's about 10mm shorter, so Acer
will have had a little less room to play with for the keyboard and
trackpad.
The lid of the S3 is made from brushed aluminium, which felt
particularly sturdy under our brutal poking. It also looks pretty good
and we'd be equally happy pulling it out at a fancy party as we are in a
boardroom meeting (not that we go to either). It also manages to avoid
the dreaded curse of greasy fingerprints, so it will continue to look
good even when you're spending all day wiping your cake-covered hands
all over it.
Sadly, the Aspire S3 doesn't have the same unibody design seen on the MacBook Air or the Asus UX21 Zenbook
that we liked so much. This means that the chassis is bolted together
from various different pieces, rather than being milled from a single
unit to have the components attached to it. The latter often results in a
sturdier machine, better suited for a rough-and-tumble lifestyle.
If you look around the edge of the screen, you can see the split and
if you really want to, you can get a fingernail in there. It's the same
situation on the bottom half, where there's a noticeable join between
the piece that makes up the wrist-rest and keyboard surround and the
piece that makes up the base-plate.
Isolated keys offer a comfortable typing experience.
Still, the S3 does feel very well built. We didn't detect any signs
of flex or nasty creaking when we beat our hands mercilessly onto the
keyboard and gave the screen's hinge a good test. Most of the body --
including the wrist-rest and keyboard surround -- are made from a
magnesium alloy that feels strong. It's quite difficult to distinguish
from regular plastic just by looking, so you won't have the same
bragging power down the pub against your mates with aluminium machines.
Although we were very pleased with the way the S3 felt in our hands
-- and we have every confidence it could take a hit or two -- we're
disappointed not to see a unibody chassis. It may not really add much to
the build and durability but it certainly adds an extra premium feel.
Without it, it makes the S3 feel as though it's lacking a certain
something when stacked up against the unibody competition.
Keyboard and trackpad
Under the lid is a keyboard that uses rounded, isolated keys
that offer a pleasing typing experience. This is thanks to them being
set just about the right distance apart and at the right height to allow
us to type comfortably at speed without making too many errors.
Annoyingly, Acer has decided to squash the arrow keys up into a tiny
little space in the bottom right-hand corner. If you often make use of
these keys then be prepared to sharpen your fingers down to a fine point
in order to comfortably use them. The Enter key has also been sliced in
half, which caused us to repeatedly hit the \ positioned above it by
accident -- especially when sending numerous fast instant messages.
Its lovely big trackpad supports multi-touch scrolling.
Admittedly, there isn't a whole lot of space to play with on a
machine of this size, but these space-saving measures have really given
an otherwise splendid keyboard a few annoyances that really start to
grate after a while.
The trackpad is smaller than the huge slabs found on the MacBook Air
and Asus Zenbook, but it's very responsive and accurate. This results in
a smooth and pleasant operation when navigating around the web for
hours on end. It supports two-finger gestures for scrolling up and down
pages, but doesn't make use of other navigation gestures found on the
MacBook Air or Asus Zenbook.
Ports
There's a typically small number of ports found around the edge
and unfortunately, Acer hasn't done a great job with them. For starters,
there are two USB 2.0 ports. We're not moaning about the amount of
ports -- computers this size just don't have the room to cram in more
sockets -- but we're very disappointed not to see USB 3.0 for ultra-fast
data transfer, especially when the Asus Zenbook and MacBook Air both
pack high-speed options.
Acer has also seen fit to cram the USB ports and the HDMI port around
the back of the laptop. This makes quickly popping in a USB stick a
case of folding the lid down to see what you're doing or turning the
machine round, which is more awkward than it needs to be.
Round the back you'll find a couple of USB ports and HMDI for hooking it up to an HDTV.
There's an SD card slot on the left-hand side though. This is handy
if you want to quickly drag holiday some snaps onto your computer for
speedy editing.
Screen
The Aspire S3 packs a 13.3-inch screen with a frankly average
resolution of 1,366x768 pixels. The 13-inch Air squeezed 1,440x900out of
its screen and the 13-inch Asus Zenbook managed 1,600x900 on its one so
the S3 is bottom of the class.
It's still a good screen and you're not likely to find yourself
desperate for more pixels. It's bright and coped well under our office
lights, albeit with a few reflections creeping in. Colours and contrast
are handled pretty well so it'll do the trick perfectly well for passing
the time on a long train journey with a bit of Emma Watson.
Performance
Under the hood of our model is an Intel Core i7-2637M processor
clocked at 1.7GHz, 4GB of RAM and a 240GB solid state disk. Annoyingly
for you -- and us -- this model won't actually be on sale. If you want
the Core i7 model, you'll have to have it with a slower 500GB hard disk
drive. If you want the faster -- and more power-efficient -- SSD, you'll
have to opt for one of the Core i5 models.
We don't quite understand Acer's decision to not let you have an SSD
with the i7 model. It's probably to stop it being astronomically costly,
but Asus and Apple have both been able to offer SSDs in their top
models without alienating their customers. It's a real shame as the
slower read/write speeds of HDDs will negate at least some of the
benefits of having the more powerful processor.
With the top specs on board, our model provided some excellent scores
on our benchmark tests. We ran the PCMark05 test and were greeted with
the very pleasant score of 9,780, which is plenty of grunt for any
office tasks and enough power for a spot of media editing if that stuff
floats your boat. On the Geekbench test, it scored an admirable 6,731.
That silver square is the hard drive. We've really no idea why it's so shiny. Maybe to check out your hair?
Both the PCMark05 and Geekbench scores from the S3 beat the scores
offered from the Asus Zenbook UX21, but not by a massive margin
considering the UX21's Intel Core i5 processor. We'd wager that having
either the lower-end processor or the slower hard drive would result in
scores being slightly below those offered by the UX21.
It's still a very nippy bit of kit and we were very pleased with the
smooth operation it offered. It didn't struggle at all with
high-definition video streaming, even when we opened several streams
across browser tabs and loaded up other programs on the computer at the
same time.
On the 3DMark06 benchmark the S3 gave a score of 3,460, which isn't
exactly sky high, but it's not terrible for a super-light laptop. It
won't handle much in the way of gaming -- unless you really dial the
settings down on the older titles -- but it's graphics power will lend a
helping hand to high-definition video and the odd spot of editing when
you need it.
Battery
It's small and light enough for you to carry around with you all
day, so you'd be absolutely right to expect that the battery can last
long enough to get you from plug A to plug B.
We ran our battery test and the S3 managed to survive 1 hour 39
minutes before conking out on us. Our battery test is brutal and frankly
cruel, so you can expect to get much better performance if you use it
sensibly. As a general rule, you're not going to get good battery life
if you're constantly watching high definition video and connected to
wireless networks. If you're sticking to a bit of word processing on the
go, there's no reason why you can't keep going for 5 hours or more
without a boost.
If you are doing a spot of work on the go, then you'll be pleased to
know that the Aspire S3 offers a very quick resume from sleep time of
just over a second and a quick start-up from off as well. A lot of that
is helped by the very quick speeds of the SSD, so how those times differ
if you opt for the hard disk-based model remains to be seen.
