After Acer launched the 13.3-inch Aspire S5 during its CES 2012 press conference, we got a few minutes up and close with the company's second latest-gen thin and light.

The Aspire S5 becomes the first officially launched PC to announce it features Intel's Thunderbolt tech - previously only found on Macs.

You can check out TechRadar's video of the Aspire S5 from sunny Las Vegas below:

The chassis is only 15mm thick, making it the world's thinnest Ultrabook thus far. While the magnesium alloy chassis is smart, it impresses without being stunning.

Part of this is down to the look and feel when you open it up. While other vendors such as Asus have worked hard to give their new thin and lights a fresh appearance, the Aspire S5 carries on from the Acer Aspire S3, giving us a rather bland appearance when opened up – and a torrid-looking but usable keyboard.

As with other Ultrabook launches, Acer made a big thing out of the quick resume time (1.5 seconds) and talked up its 'always connected' tech, Acer Always Connect – a service that enables you to access information on your PC while it's still asleep. A nice idea, but wouldn't you have access to stuff like emails on your smartphone anyway?

There is one rather innovative feature - a MagicFlip I/O port panel (as Acer calls it) flips down at the back, providing room for the kind of extra ports that have had to be axed from other thin and lights that have recently made it onto market.

The port panel is activated by pressing this button on the side of the keyboard.

As you'd expect, there's USB 3.0 ports on board, plus an as-yet-unspecified Intel Core processor, SSD storage and beefed-up Home Theatre audio.

We'd expect the S5 to be launched with Core i5 and i7 processors, though since Acer said during its press conference that it wanted to take Ultrabooks into the mainstream laptop market, it's wholly possible that we'll see an i3 variant sneak in there.

While we haven't seen Ultrabooks featuring Core i3 as yet, we know of at least one that's definitely coming.

As for battery life, Acer claimed that the battery power would be "three times" as good as vatteries

Expect the Acer S5 UK release date and Acer S5 US release date to be sometime in the Spring.