Gadgetory

well this is Johanna for The Verge and this is the Acer Aspire s3 which isn't only one of the first ultra books on the market but is actually one of the most affordable and one of the first things you'll notice about this laptop is actually how thin and light it is but unfortunately the system does not feel as solid as the MacBook Air or some other PC laptops on the market it actually feels pretty cheap the top is actually made out of aluminum which gives it somewhat of a solid build when it's closed when you open it up you realize that the palm rest and the bezel and also the bottom of the system are made out of plastic so they've colored the plastic to sort of match the aluminum color but it is definitely plastic you can sort of hear how hollow it is when you tap it and unfortunately that sort of cheap feel carries over to the keyboard and the keyboard itself is made out of sort of a matte plastic and you can hear the clicking of the keys which can be a little bit frustrating on top of that they're a little bit mushy and they also have these small little arrow keys in the corner I'm not really sure why they did that the same sort of goes for the touchpad it's also made out of plastic and you hear sort of that clicking sound to it but for a Windows 7 touchpad it actually works pretty well it is a pretty responsive in terms of two fingers scrolling and pinch-to-zoom so a certain table worked pretty hard here on performance and getting rid of some of those sacrifices you once had to deal with for a thin and light system they've packed the system with a Core i5 processor four gigs of RAM and a twenty gigabyte SSD along with 320 gigabytes of a harddrive space the SSD allows the system to boot pretty quickly and resume from sleep in two seconds but unfortunately the rest of the OS sort of launching programs and launching applications is a little bit slower the most disappointing thing about the performance is definitely the battery life acer claimed that this would last about seven to eight hours but in my test I've only gotten it to run for about three to four hours which just is not enough for a system this mobile so for $8.99 the s3 is definitely the most affordable Ultrabook out there but the sacrifices just seemed too many for the price for those that are in the market for a thin and light laptop I would definitely suggest Apple's MacBook Air even if it is $400 more you definitely get a better build quality and longer battery life for the price or you can wait for one of the new ultra books coming from a Suz Toshiba and Lenovo