Skip to main content

Filed under:

Ultrabook reviews

Intel's seen the future of the laptop, and it's called the ultrabook. Designed to compete head-to-head with the MacBook Air, these new machines are extremely thin, promise over five hours of battery life, and boot / resume from sleep very quickly. Every major laptop manufacturer now has an ultrabook on its product list, so whether you favor Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, or Toshiba, there's a review here for you.

  • Joanna Stern

    Oct 14, 2011

    Joanna Stern

    Acer Aspire S3 Ultrabook review

    Acer Aspire S3
    Acer Aspire S3

    Back in June, Intel laid out its plan for the future of the laptop. These "ultrabooks," as Intel thought it would be more appropriate to call them, had to become more like phones and tablets — more portable, more nimble, and unlike the ultraportables of past, more affordable. They had to be, well, more like Apple’s MacBook Air. However, Chipzilla did more than just present its vision: it provided a guiding light for those non-Apple manufacturers with a set of guidelines on how to create said ultrabooks and set up a $300 million dollar fund to provide the cash to set them on the right path.

    Acer’s Aspire S3 is the first of those ultrabooks, and it has all the raw components to help achieve Intel’s vision of the future laptop. The .51-inch thick / 2.98-pound system’s got a speedy Core i5 processor, an SSD / hard drive combo to help wake it from sleep in two seconds flat, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, and a $900 price tag. With the help of Intel, the performance and price pieces have been put in place. But neither of those are the S3’s problems. Hit the break to find out exactly what I'm talking about and how the first ultrabook fares.

    Read Article >