Acer has entered its version of an ultrabook, the Aspire S3, into Intel’s race to the top. Acer S3 is one of the furious model of Acer notebooks designed for great speed and performance. The design not only tells how powerful the Ultrabook is, it also has a sexy and sleek design which is perfect to the taste of everybody.
The Aspire is 0.7-in. thick at the front; it measures 0.8-in. thick at the rear. At 12.6 x 8.5 in., it’s slightly shorter and half an inch narrower than the Air. The system’s 3.0-lb. weight is on a par with the Air but it is a couple of ounces lighter than the Zenbook. If we add the AC adapter, its travel weight rises to 3.7 lb. - 2 oz. more than the Zenbook’s travel weight. Charging the Aspire S3 requires a three-prong outlet, which can be inconvenient. The Aspire S3 is equipped with the Intel Core i5-2467M processor, which runs at 1.6GHz but can run briefly at up to 2.3GHz when needed. The system comes with its maximum 4GB RAM. Aspire S3 has taken a big step forward by using hybrid storage system that mates a 320GB traditional hard drive with 20GB of solid state storage. In this setup, the most-used data and program code is kept in flash memory rather than in the slower hard drive. Apart from this, the Aspire S3 uses the Intel HD Graphics 3000 graphics engine, but it has 128MB of dedicated video memory. It can also boost video memory to 1.7GB by using system RAM. Above the display is an HD webcam that can capture sharp stills and video with its 1280 x 1024 resolution. Although it can hardly get particularly loud, it has a high-quality audio system. The Aspire S3 uses Dolby Home Theater software and sounded great when connected to external speakers, but its built-in speakers are underneath the system and sounded muted and concave. Aspire S3 has also got limit in the variety of ports. It has a pair of USB 2.0 (but no USB 3.0) ports, along with a full-size HDMI and audio ports, but it does without VGA or Ethernet ports. It offers 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a flash card reader that works with SD and MMC modules. The system comes with Windows 7 Home Premium and can tap into Intel’s Anti-Theft and Identity Protection technologies. It includes McAfee’s Internet Security Suite with 30 days of update along with one-year warranty which comes of accident protection. Talking about its battery, it can run for 3 hours and 14 minutes on a charge while continuously playing HD videos from a USB drive.
Acer’s Aspire S3 laptop completely changed the notion that we have to pay a lot to get a slim, light notebook that doesn’t disappoint in terms of performance. But being slightly smaller, it fails to live up to the ultrabook ideal, mainly because of its disappointingly short battery life. If its battery could run longer on a charge, it would have simply win the league.
