In our Acer Aspire S3 ultrabook review we find being second tomarket isn't always a good thing and the Acer S3-951 suffers from a lack of features and refinement. The Acer Aspire S3-951 is the first of anew wave of Apple MacBook Air clones that have been announced by Windows PC manufacturers.
The new product category has been dubbed ultrabook by Intel, keen to keep its processor order-books filled as consumers abandon the netbook which previously propped up sales of its underpowered Intel Atom processor.
Intel is not only creating a slush fund to help incentivise this push into Apple’s ultraportable territory, it’s even handed out a blueprint notebook design for the likes of Acer, Asus and Toshiba to follow.
Acer was quick to market with its Acer Aspire S3-951, a copy of the 13in version of the Apple MacBook Air. But in order to compete with the original, Acer needs to innovate with useful technology not found in Apple’s lightweight notebook; or match the quality and sell for a much lower price. Let’s see where it’s succeeded.
Design
First impression of the Acer Aspire S3-951 with its lid closed is positive. But what appears to be an all-metal construction is soon revealed on handling to be a plastic laptop with a thin skin of brushed metal just covering the lid. The rest of the S3-951 is assembled from plastic that’s been painted a silver-grey colour to mimic the Air’s high-grade all-metal construction.
Like the Air, the closed Acer Aspire S3-951 tapers from the rear to the front, only is fatter at both edges. At its maximum at the rear, the S3-951 is 18mm against the Air’s 17mm.
In weight, Acer has patently been paring down the grams in order to beat Apple’s example, settling for 3g lighter at 1338g on the sample we reviewed.
The keyboard is like Apple’s now-familiar Scrabble tile type, but without the same precision feel. There’s a little more sponginess on these grey keys. Also troubling was the way the double-height Return was actually a single-height key. We often found ourselves hitting the ‘\’ key above, which has been shaped to look like part of the Return key.
The trackpad follows Apple’s idea of buttonless operation. Unlike the MacBook Air, multi-touch support is rather hit or miss here. Mostly the latter – you can try two-finger vertical scrolling, and pinch-to-zoom sometimes works in some apps. There’s even a four-finger swipe ro hide an open Windows program. But sideways scrolling, three-finger gestures and four-finger-and-a-thumb gestures are all absent.
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