Acer Aspire S3 Review

Acer Aspire S3 Review and Best Prices

The Acer Aspire S3 looks very nice in the product photos, and it is often associated with Ultrabooks because this type of design, which is inspired from the Macbook Air, has been used by many PC manufacturers in their recent designs. I like the new look very much, and I have been pretty bullish about Ultrabooks, at least much more than I ever was about Netbooks. Although Ultrabooks often share a similar hardware platform from Intel, they differ more than one may think, and depending on how they were designed, the end-user experience can be very different from one model to the next, so don’t let the superficial resemblance fool you. In this review, I will tell you how it felt to use the Acer Aspire S3 and we will look at what I felt was its strengths and weaknesses.

The Acer Aspire S3 Review Ultrabook has an agreeable design. It is thin, compact, and light. The loaner unit that we have even has a custom paint job that was done for Intel. The case seems to be built with a Magnesium alloy, which is a classic material for laptops and notebooks. Overall, it feels rigid enough, but there is a little bit of “flex”, especially with the display – it’s not as flexible as the Toshiba Ultrabook Z830 whose screen is *very* flexible, but we’re definitely not in the rigidity territory that the Macbook Air or Asus Zenbook are in.

The Acer Aspire S3 looks good, and seems to handle well when folded--there's no weird weight distribution that might make it susceptible to drops when you're juggling it with other gear. The plastic shell isn't as rigid as the alloy shells on some Ultrabooks, but it's functional. Opening the Aspire S3 reveals a muted gray keyboard that almost disappears into the chassis and otherwise is notable for possessing the tiniest set of navigation keys (arrows, Page Up, Page Down, and the like) that I can recall seeing on any Windows laptop. They're not much bigger than cell phone Chiclet keys, and about the only positive I can see is that the Page Down and Page Up keys are discrete, so they don't require a separate function key press.

Key travel is very short, but I got used to that pretty quickly. I found the tactile feedback quite recognizable for such short travel, so touch-typing accuracy should be fairly good. And since the trackpad doesn't pick up a hovering palm, the cursor doesn't skate across the screen unexpectedly. The right and left buttons are invisible and are built into the lower right and left corners of the touchpad.

The Aspire S3 ships with a 1.6GHz Intel Core-i5 2467M low-voltage CPU that clocks in at 1.6GHz and offers a maximum Turbo setting of 2.3GHz. The laptop has 4GB of total system memory, but 0.15GB of that goes to the Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics. The 2467M CPU, with its 3MB of L3 cache, probably contributed to the model's middling WorldBench 6 score of 97. Battery life was a bit low for an ultraportable laptop, too, at just under 5 hours (the average for the category is around 6.5 hours). Owing to Acer's use of integrated graphics, the Aspire S3 is no gaming powerhouse either. You can play some games at limited resolutions and detail settings, but serious gaming is best left to other systems.

The display has an average, 1366-by-768-pixel native resolution. When I sat in the sweet spot, the screen looked bright and colorful. Still photos looked good and HD content streamed over the local area network smoothly. However, streaming Netflix HD content looked even softer than it usually does. In addition, the LCD panel's range of angles for high-quality viewing is rather restricted, with noticeable color and contrast shifts at minor displacements from dead center.

In the end, the Acer Aspire S3 does look good, but in the current competitive landscape, this computer should be priced at $749, and not at $899. If you are willing to spend close $1000, there are not much better options out there. I hope that this Acer Aspire S3 review has helped you form an opinion about this computer.

Shops		Product	Price
		Acer Aspire S3-951-6646 13.3-Inch Ultrabook	$799.99 used from: $850.00	Go to Store
		Acer Aspire S3-951-6464	$850.00 used from: $899.95	Go to Store
		Acer Computer Aspire S3-951-6646 Ultrabook 13.3" Notebook PC	$869.99	Go to Store
		Acer Aspire S3-951-6828 13.3-Inch HD Display Ultrabook	$889.99 used from: $850.00	Go to Store
		Acer Aspire S-Series S3-951-6675 13.3 Ultrabook, Intel Core i5-2467M (1.60GHz), 4GB DDR3 Memory, 500GB HDD, 20GB SSD, Intel Graphics, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit	$999.00	Go to Store
		Acer Aspire S3-951-6432 13.3-Inch HD Display Ultrabook	$1199.99 used from: $850.00	Go to Store
		Acer Aspire S3-951-6432 13.3 Notebook PC	$1299.99	Go to Store
		Acer Aspire S3-951-6432 13.3 Notebook PC	$1299.99	Go to Store

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