Ultrabook is probably the biggest revolution that will be happening in the notebook market and Acer is not lagging behind. They are bringing out an Aspire S3 Ultrabook which has ton of features and is a good buy for medium value purchasers. The ultrabook makers are trying to compete against the MacBook Air and Acer is also not an exception. The stylish aluminum finish lid is elegant to watch. The exterior however could have been enhanced but due to lower price Acer had to sacrifice a bit. However, in the interior there is silver colored plastic which is quite good-looking. It is 0.6 inches at its width at the most and is a shade thicker than MacBook Air, but the weight is the real plus. It is only 3 pounds at most. So it is really easy to carry from one place to another.

The heat dissipation is really good. At most it increases up to 85 degrees to 91 degrees, far below the uncomfortable level of 95 degrees. The keyboard is of island style and the keys have a fair spacing between them, with the exception of the arrow keys which were shorter and painful to use. The keys were not that much responsive though and it was having a high amount of error rate as well. So thumbs down for the keyboard. The touchpad was highly responsive and was easier to use. It a bit small in size than that in MacBook Air though. The display is probably one of the worst things that the Acer S3 possesses. The 13.3 inch screen provided low image quality and the resolution was also lower. The pixels were broken at many levels of a 720p video as well.

The power packed 1.6 GHz second generation i5-2600m processor was pretty fast and combining with 4 GB RAM and 320GB 5400rpm Hard Disk drive it gave a good performance overall. But all the way in an ultrabook comparing with MacBook Air it is a lot slower than usual. The boot up time is the biggest factor that Ultrabooks are expected to outdate MacBook Air, but this S3 does not come even near to that. It takes over 1 minute to boot the Windows 7 premium with its 5400 hard disk drive and it is again a thumb down. The battery backup is good and is upto 4hours 25 minutes clearly below what Acer claimed of about 6-7 hours. The Acer Aspire S3 is quite a good buy but not a recommended one for sure.