With Aspire S3, Acer goes heavy into ultrabooks

Believing the ultrabook market is about to hit a renaissance, PC vendor Acer America announced the availability this week of its first ultrabook, the Acer Aspire S3-951.

“We’re not just dipping out toe into the water; we’re going heavy into ultrabooks,” said Eric Ackerson, senior product marketing and brand manager with Acer America. “We’re already working on our second and third generation ultrabooks, and we’re focusing heavily on industrial design.”

The S3 boasts a 13.3” display and weighs-in at 2.98 lbs, measuring 12.59” by 8.52” by .51” to .68”, making liberal use of magnesium aluminum/alloy materials to keep the weigh down. It’s powered by an Intel Core i5 processor with Intel HD graphics, and features a 20GB solid state drive, a 320GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM.

Ackerson said a key selling-point for the S3 is it’s instant-on capability, allowing it to boot from off or sleep quickly by caching to a supplemental SSD. Acer is also boasting about the battery life, promising all-day computing with eight hours of use on full charge, and up to 50 days of standby time.

Acer is aiming the S3 at three primary markets: the ultra mobile executive or salesperson who is always on the go and wants something that lasts all day, students going to class who want something to take from room to room, and PC users that want something cool and fashionable like the Macbook Air but don’t want to go to the Apple OS.

The S3 is priced at US$899, and Ackerson said Acer is working on lower and higher configurations based on other Intel Core processors and with different hard drive configurations which will launch in the coming months.

Take a closer look at the S3 in this CDN video report:

Follow Jeff Jedras on Twitter: @JeffJedrasCDN.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Jeff Jedras
Jeff Jedras
A veteran technology and business journalist, Jeff Jedras began his career in technology journalism in the late 1990s, covering the booming (and later busting) Ottawa technology sector for Silicon Valley North and the Ottawa Business Journal, as well as everything from municipal politics to real estate. He later covered the technology scene in Vancouver before joining IT World Canada in Toronto in 2005, covering enterprise IT for ComputerWorld Canada. He would go on to cover the channel as an assistant editor with CDN. His writing has appeared in the Vancouver Sun, the Ottawa Citizen and a wide range of industry trade publications.

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