Acer
Aspire S3
A
powerful portable marred by poor battery life
The
Acer Aspire S3 (£899 inc. VAT) is one of Acer’s dinkiest laptops yet, and the
price is appealing considering the impressive specs list. With a thickness of
18mm at its widest point, the Aspire S3 may not be as ‘size zero’ slender as
the Toshiba or Asus, but it’s certainly thin enough to slide into an oversized
handbag. The lid is impressively slim - and also tough enough to take a
pounding. There’s almost no flex in the centre either, so the display remains
protected even when the laptop is bumping around in a bag.
The
reduced chassis space means a compact keyboard, the nemesis of anyone with
sausage fingers. Thankfully most keys are wellsized, and although the arrow
keys are almost comically tiny, touch typing is still a breeze. The touchpad is
also a decent size, but cursed with integrated mouse buttons. You need to push
the left and right corners of the pad down to simulate mouse clicks. The cursor
often skips across the screen when the corners are pushed, leading to incorrect
menu selections - after a couple of hours, we came close to busting out the
power tools and giving the Aspire S3 a few new air vents. Thankfully you can
tap the touchpad’s surface for left mouse clicks instead.
 |
The integrated mouse buttons in the Acer touchpad
makes the cursor run
wildly round the screen when
you try to click
|
The
13.3-inch display is perfectly serviceable for both business and pleasure. It
isn’t the brightest screen ever, but the 1,366 x 768-pixel resolution means
images are sharp and HD movies look crisp. The glossy Super-TFT finish is
reflective, however - a hindrance if you want to use the Aspire S3 outdoors.
Regular travellers will prefer the Toshiba’s matt screen. Ports are standard
for an Ultrabook, with an HDMI connector and two USB ports crammed onto the
rear. If you have tons of files to lug around, you'll need to use one of the
USB ports to hook up an external hard drive.
Despite
the specs listing a 240GB solid state drive, the Acer only reported 200GB of
storage. This fills up far too quickly, especially if you’re hoping to carry
some tunes or movies with you, although at least it gives you super speedy and
reliable access to your data. You also have an SD card reader for extra
storage.
Small
but powerful
The
real selling point of the Aspire S3 is the set of components stuffed in its
tiny gullet. The dual-core Intel Core i7 ULV processor, backed up by 4GB of
memory, had no problem handling all kinds of software at once. Applications
loaded quickly (helped in part by that speedy solid state drive) and ran
smoothly. In fact, the Aspire S3 proved to be the most powerful Ultrabook we’ve
reviewed, narrowly beating its Asus rival.
Intel Core i7 A range of dual and quad-core processors with up to four processing cores fitted on to a single chip. Delivering staggering levels of power and providing full support for 64-bit software, performance can be more than double that of dual-core chips, such as those from Intel's older Core 2 Duo range.
Graphical
performance is also dependable. Although the GPU is integrated, it’s still
capable of running multimedia software such as photo and video editing suites,
without suffering from glitches or crashes. Unfortunately, the battery life was
a lot less impressive. We ran HD video on loop and were disappointed when the
Aspire S3 died after 181 minutes. Considering this is an Ultrabook, which is
built for portability, the result is disappointing. If you’re often on the
road, consider the Samsung or Asus instead.
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