Acer Aspire S3 Laptop Review

Acer’s ultrabook doesn’t look massively different to that from any other manufacturer, but there's one crucial specification difference: instead of a big SSD, Acer has kept costs down with a combination of flash storage and a conventional hard disk. The 20GB SSD automatically caches files from the 320GB hard disk as you use them, which Acer says will make the Aspire S3 almost as responsive as an ultrabook equipped with a fully-fledged SSD. We didn’t notice it during a cold boot, which took over a minute to reach the Windows desktop, but it resumed from sleep mode in a much snappier two seconds.

It's pretty clear that every Ultrabook maker is gunning for the MacBook Air, and the Aspire S3 is no exception. However, Acer had to make some sacrifices to keep its price low--no duralumin or unibody designs here. The lid of the Acer Aspire S3 battery is a brushed aluminum, but the underside and deck are made of a silver-colored plastic, and it's made to look like a unibody design even though it is not. The black hinge area at the rear accommodates the S3's ports as well as an air vent. Four rubber pads on the bottom also keep the S3 from sliding around on a desk.

Straight out of the box, the 13-inch Aspire S3 is a beautiful piece of hardware. Just 13mm at its thickest point, it's substantially thinner than the 13-inch MacBook Air (which is 17mm at its thickest, though more starkly tapered toward the front). It's also essentially the same weight: both are just under 1.4kg.

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 Acer Aspire S3 AC adapter hard disk-based model remains to be seen.

This leaves twin USB 2.0 ports and HDMI at the back, and leads to similar issues as with Dell’s recent XPS 14z: it makes USB devices awkward to plug in and exposes them to possible damage when picking the laptop up or putting it down at a slight angle (as many people frequently do). The USB ports are also far too close together.

The island-style keyboard on the S3 isn't the worst we've ever used, but it was a bit stiff; keys were large and well spaced (with the exception of the arrow keys, which were a pain), but we would have preferred a little more travel and responsiveness. On more than one occasion, the keyboard missed our inputs when we were typing at a fast pace, and we had to make a conscious effort to press harder. And since the trackpad doesn't pick up a hovering palm, the cursor doesn't skate across the screen unexpectedly. However, it is cursed with integrated mouse buttons. Instead of having separate mouse buttons, you need to push the left and right corners of the pad down to simulate mouse clicks.

The dull gray color isn't very eye-catching, but the overall slim silhouette is still appealing--this is a good-looking laptop, but not a great-looking one. It has a bit of a sedate business laptop vibe to it.

Acer has set out to offer high performance at a lower price points than its rivals. Our review unit featured a high-end Intel Core i7-2637M dual-core processor running at 1.7GHz. This can be increased to 2.8GHz to handle complex multimedia tasks using Intel's Turbo Boost functionality.

On the graphics side of things, you get the typical Intel integrated graphics results. The Dell R3026 battery was more than competent at playing back local and streaming HD video and obviously wasn’t much of a gaming rig. It notched a fairly unplayable 10fps on Just Cause 2. During that gaming test the system's bottom left side got warm, but the rest of the machine stayed relatively cool and the fan in the back didn’t rev up.

Speaking of coffee shops, you need to have a battery life to accommodate the portability of the device. Run the device to its fullest potential and it will last you for about 2 hours. That’s it. Use it conservatively and you may just touch the 4-hour mark depending on your usage. The battery life isn’t anything to boast about but it is better than what is found on most entry level notebooks. One of the reasons why the Acer Aspire S3 battery suffers is that the device has an HDD along with the SSD. The advantage is 320GB storage as the largest SSD available today is 256GB.

Pros:
Thin. Light. Core i5 processor and 4GB memory provide potent performance. Combination of spinning hard drive and SSD provides larger storage capacity without losing speed. More affordable than competitors.

Cons:
Display has lower resolution, limited viewing angles. Construction feels cheap.

Bottom Line:
The Acer Aspire S3 has a super-thin profile, larger storage capacity than competitors, and unmatched affordability, but it has some rough patches, like a cheap-feeling construction and a disappointing display.

In the end, the Acer Aspire S3 attempts to be an affordable, visually attractive, and usable Ultrabook. It only partly meets those goals. The keyboard is mostly good, but the laptop's mediocre audio quality, lack of high-speed USB, shorter-than-average Dell R3026 battery life, and modest performance make it less than appealing. Still, if you need a very thin, very light Windows PC for mostly nondemanding office and Web chores, the Aspire S3 may suit you.

It's a shame neither of the two USB ports support the fast USB3 standard, but there is a memory card slot for copying photos from a digital camera as well as a full-sized HDMI port for connecting another monitor. Where the S3 really excels is performance – the 1.6GHz Core i7 2637M processor and 4GB of memory make this the fastest ultrabook we've seen yet. Also present is a 240GB solid state disk (SSD) which is big for a SSD.

The market for ultrabooks has also expanded to include a few other laptops, like the Samsung Series 9. We’ve seen that in person, and the one area where it’s clearly better is contrast ratio on the LCD—and a matte LCD as well. We haven’t been able to test it yet, but we should have that one soon enough. Performance of the base model with an i3 ULV processor will certainly be lower than what we’re testing with the Acer S3 and ASUS UX31E, but we saw the upgraded NP900X3A-A02US model with i5-2537M and a 128GB SSD going for as little as $999 last week; sadly, the price is now back up to $1430, which isn’t nearly so interesting. It’s one to keep an eye out for, though, as $999 is a massive discount compared to where the Acer Aspire S3 charger launched and that particular model has pretty good specs.

This is a great, top-of-the-line Ultrabook with super performance. It would get an Editor’s Choice if it wasn’t for the price. But if you can find it on the street for around $1,500-$1,600, a Highly Recommended award would certainly be justified.