It’s easy to spend a lot on Ultrabooks. It’s less simple, however, to try and make one affordable. You can find a lot of $500-$600 (USD) laptops, and they’re perfectly fine for most people. They’ll probably have an AMD or Intel i3 chipset, they’ll be a little heavy, but they’ll have a decent keyboard, a big hard drive and a large screen.

Ultrabooks, however, demand a premium price because they’re at least above average, if not premium products. (As 2012 wears on, however, I expect the prices to fall.). This first crop of Ultrabooks is based on Intel’s Sandy Bridge architecture – not the Intel’s Ivy Bridge architecture, which will provide a power boost, etc. etc. (Intel recently announced a delay in shipping the Ivy Bridge.)

But enough background – a little Web search will find all the information you need on Ultrabook architectures. Here’s my take on what I found to be the most affordable of the early crop of Ultrabooks: the Acer Aspire S3. The specific model I reviewed was the Acer Aspire S3-951-6646 13.3-Inch Ultrabook. This first review will discuss my experience with it fresh out of the box; a later review will give my impression of using it for a while.

So, again, my goal was to find something that was on the lower end of the Ultrabook scale – while hopefully finding something that would work as a developer’s daily machine for a dev who perhaps has to travel, even if it’s among buildings.

This Acer Aspire S3 is reasonably priced, compared to other Ultrabooks, even when I tried to spec out a reasonably powered box. The configuration I chose – readily available at Amazon US (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005MR58MG/) for $799 USD, $50 off the $849 list, puts it at least a few hundred cheaper than other Ultrabooks. Where’s the cost savings? It’s largely in the storage: instead of a 128GB SSD, Acer paired a 20GB SSD with a 320GB hard drive. While the ultimate performance is not as fast (that’s foreshadowing), it’s an interesting idea for storage-hungry devs. At that storage capacity you can actually manage to run a VM on the fly. And at least in the initial playing around, the "instant-on" capability worked well thanks to that 20GB SSD.

Other specs: Intel Core i5 1.6 GHz processor, 4 GB RAM (it’s surprisingly hard to find 8GB RAM in a preconfigured unit), a 13.3-inch screen, and Intel 3000 graphics. What does that mean? It’s reasonably fast but definitely not a gaming machine.

One quick note before I talk about my impressions of the unit: Acer claims they’re not making any profit off of the Ultrabook at the $799 price point (see http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/6/2850436/acer-ultrabook-price-unsustainable), but their goal is to get it to $499 regardless as the Ultrabook gets more popular.

Initial impressions:

The packaging was minimalist and straightforward – just a small box, nicely packaged, with the unit and the power cord. As with most Windows 7 laptops, I "enjoyed" the initial configuration screens and then booted into Windows.

The overall appearance is polished and finished – not quite MacBook Air quality, but close. It was thin and light (Acer says it’s 0.7 inches thick and under 3 pounds).

A little too much crapware, in my opinion, in the initial configuration, so I immediately spent time removing the Bing bar, the eBay icon (seriously?), MacAfee, Norton Backup, Acer Games (a bunch of WildTangent games), and a few others. I give credit to Acer, however, for at least including Evernote.

Acer did include a nice system update utility; however, I found that the drivers were still out of date and manually updated the BIOS and a couple of drivers after I visited Acer’s support site, which was straightforward to navigate. All of that went quickly; no more than 20 minutes.

Initial impressions of the screen were that it seemed a bit washed out, but was still crisp. Connections seemed straightforward, although I don’t really like them on the back of the laptop because I have to lean around to get into them, they’re awkward, and so forth.

I immediately noticed that unlike the Asus Ultrabooks, Acer did not include a dongle for RGB connections – if you need video out you’re using HDMI or getting your own dongle. (At that price point, I didn’t really expect an included dongle.) It’s also missing an Ethernet port, but a quick Internet search found me a hack to use my Apple USB to Ethernet adapter, and that worked fine. Another cost-saving measure that did surprise me, however, is that neither of the USB ports supported USB 3 – which I think is pretty standard for a new laptop in 2012.

Installation of Microsoft Office and Microsoft Visual Studio, along with my other must-have programs like Notepad++, Paint.NET, PDF writers, Microsoft Security Essentials, went smoothly and quickly.

In the initial setup, however, I found it difficult to get used to the trackpad, which I chalked up to getting used to a new device, and also occasionally dropping letters while typing, which I again chalked up to feel. In my next installment, after I’ve spent some time with the device, I’ll report in on how I found it after I’d used it a while.

Initial verdict: If you’re looking to take the Ultrabook plunge and don’t want to spend over $1200-$1400 USD on one, the Acer looks to be a solid and attractive choice.

Fig 1

The minimal packaging is nicely done, although not to the standards of Apple or other, more expensive Ultrabooks.

Fig 2

Here’s the Acer Aspire S3 fresh out of the box. Note the sunglasses for size comparison. It’s reasonably sized but not too small for use.

Fig 3

There’s not a ton of ‘crapware’ on the machine, but there’s still enough that you have to take some time to clean it off.

Fig 4

Look at the nice, thin profile – easy to carry around between meetings, on trips, etc.

Acer Aspire S3: A First Look At An Affordable Ultrabook