REVIEW: Acer Aspire S3 Ultrabook

Acer's Aspire S3 Ultrabook hopes to steal the hearts and minds of laptop buyers away from Apple's Macbook Air so  we decided to test the Acer S3 model 951-2464G34iss during flights to Darwin and Bali to see how it compared to our usual travel laptop choices of a Lenovo Thinkpad X201 or a generic netbook.

Intel made the bold claim at Computex 2011 that the new range of thin and light Ultrabook laptops manufactured by its OEM laptop manufacturer partners will make up 40 per cent of the consumer laptop market by Christmas 2012.

The 1.3kg Aspire S3 definitely ticks the box in terms of thin slick looks. If it got any closer to looking like the Macbook Air then litigation-happy Apple would likely have issued a lawsuit.

To achieve 17.5mm thickness Acer has chosen the same connectivity compromise made by the Macbook Air. The S3 lacks an Ethernet port so Wireless N WiFi is the only option to access the internet or network file shares.

If you plan to use your laptop in controlled environments where the WiFi signal is strong and available throughout the building then this isn't an issue. However, both hotel rooms we stayed in were in the corner of the building and had weak WiFi signals.

We couldn't use the hotel ethernet connection in Darwin so we tethered the laptop to a Motorola Atrix Android phone and used its Telstra NextG data in our room. However, in Bali we had to work in the hotel's pool area to access its WiFi signal.

Battery life for the S3 951-2464G34iss model is claimed to be six hours. We watched three hours of fullscreen video podcasts loaded onto the laptop while flying to Darwin and organised/edited photos taken there for two hours before battery warnings appeared on screen. Six hours should be quite possible with less intensive use such as typing and surfing the web.

The LED-backlit 13.3" screen has an aspect ratio of 16:9 which matches the format of widescreen video and is quite bright. However, it has a lower resolution of 1366x768 compared to the Air's 1440x990. Both screens are highly reflective which can be an issue when viewed outdoors in the bright Australian sunlight.

The S3's keyboard isn't backlit but is easy to use whereas the trackpad will polarise users. We prefer a trackpad with buttons at the bottom like the Toshiba Portege Z830 rather than the S3's buttonless trackpad.

Speed was not an issue as the Intel Core i5 1.6 GHz CPU coupled with 4GB RAM easily managed all our work tasks including playing 1080P HD video recorded from our digital camera.

Storage is an interesting hybrid combination of a 20GB SSD and a 320GB 5400rpm hard drive. The SSD ensures rapid start from sleep mode and the hard drive stores all your files and applications.

Office 2010 Starter is useful but McAfee Internet Security constantly annoys you to upgrade from the trial version and there are a few other pre-installed bloatware programs and desktop shortcuts which are clearly only there because Acer used payments from those software vendors to increase its profit margin.

Overall the $1399 RRP Aspire S3 is an impressive first effort from the 1^st generation Windows Ultrabook laptop camp when you consider that it is competing against the 5^th generation of Macbook Airs.

One strength Windows laptops have always had over Apple is variations in hardware amongst competing models eg: Matt/Gloss screen. It will be interesting to see which Ultrabooks from first movers Acer, ASUS, Toshiba and Lenovo win the hearts of laptop buyers.