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Available from Dion Wired and Game from R9 999.

The Acer Aspire S3 is the first notebook out of Intel’s new ultrabook category, and it’s a doozie. It is hoping this new notebook genre will stimulate sales in the PC market like the netbook did over the last couple of years.

The S3 is wafer thin and, thanks to its dual core i5 CPU, hybrid mechanical/solid state hard drive and pots of bundled RAM, it’s also pretty zippy. Add to this just over five hours of battery life and an extremely reasonable sticker price, the S3 is worth checking out.

Finished in a combination of alloy and plastic, it has a brushed metal finish and curvy lines, all of which are pleasing to the eye. You’d be forgiven for mistaking the S3 for a MacBook Air. Not only is it just 12.9 mm thick, it weighs only 1.3kg.

The S3’s keyboard looks and feels similar to the Air’s, although it isn’t backlit. As with the Macbook, the touchpad proved usable, even with the right and left mouse buttons integrated into the trackpad. The S3’s 13.3-inch display bordered on dazzling and delivered astonishingly accurate colour reproduction thanks to LED backlighting.

What really did surprise was the S3’s audio. Where most skinny notebooks tend to have thin, crappy and distorted audio, it delivered surprisingly rich sound.

Acer has incorporated a cleverly curved design to the S3’s outer body, which lets it accommodate two USB 2.0 ports as well as an HDMI port plus an SD/MMC card reader slot and headset/mic jacks.

Under the hood, the S3 comes with 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 as well as a 1.3-megapixel bezel-mounted webcam. Other connectivity options such as VGA and ethernet ports and an optical drive are conspicuous by their absence, but this is fairly standard with such a wafer thin notebook PC design.

Where Acer has really come through is storage – instead of using compact yet fast solid state drive, it has instead gone down the hybrid solid state/mechanical hard drive route. This is a clever move in that it allows Acer to offer a roomy drive without pushing the S3’s price into the stratosphere. It’s a 320GB drive, over double the SSD drive capacities typically offered.

Rounding things out, Acer has pre-installed a good selection of apps. These range from the genuinely useful (such as Microsoft Office Starter, plus a 60-day trial of McAfee internet security), through to shovel-ware (the Kobo App and Acer Games, plus a number of Acer utilities).

The S3’s dual-core Intel Core i5 – the same ultra-low voltage CPU as used in the MacBook Air –is a great choice as it doesn’t overheat and is easy on batteries. With 4GB of RAM on board, the S3 feels pretty zippy.

Verdict? The Acer Aspire S3 is the first ultrabook I’ve managed to get my hands on, and it definitely impressed. – New Zealand Herald.

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