Acer Aspire S3 review

The Acer Aspire S3 bodywork is decent, if not quite deserving of any superlatives. It's the same story with the screen.

You get a 13.3-inch 1080p IPS screen offering a bright backlight, vibrant colours and the great viewing angles you normally get with IPS. It's a strong display, much better than the TN-type screen used in previous generations of Aspire S3. The tone of the screen is quite warm, giving whites a slightly yellow tone that skews the colours in general, but it's not too serious and the look of the display is perfectly pleasant. Viewing angles are good too.

The screen rotates around a full 180 degrees too, making it pretty easy to share the display – although obviously it's not quite as flexible as a removable screen tablet-laptop hybrid, or one that rotates around 360 degrees like the Lenovo Yoga. It's a 'normal' laptop screen in this respect.

Glossy screen

The Acer Aspire S3's display has a standard glossy finish, making it a bit tricky to use outdoors. It doesn't have the nova-like brightness required to make using a laptop on a sunny day easy either, but few laptops do.

As you'd expect of a modern Windows Ultrabook, the screen is touch-enabled and supports 10-point multitouch. There's a fair bit of bezel around the actual display, but the entire top of the display is a single pane of glass, giving it that higher-end look.

You can expect future generations of Aspire S3 (if they come to be) to have QHD displays, and possibly ones that fill more of the screen surround. But Acer has really got the basics right this time – in previous generations they were distinctly iffy.

Keyboard

The Acer Aspire S3 has a keyboard typical of a slim and light laptop. It uses chiclet keys that poke through the single-piece aluminium keyboard surround, and their action is a little on the shallow side.

While the usual letter keys are large enough to allow for typing that doesn't feel cramped, the keys at the laptop's edges have had to be crushed together a little in order to fit everything in. The Caps lock is tiny, as is the left shift, and there are no dedicated function buttons.

Instead, almost half of the laptop's keys take on secondary duties, often for keys that might have their own buttons even in a slim laptop. It's because the Acer Aspire S3 is effectively missing a whole extra row of buttons compared with a full-size keyboard. You'll have to use the Fn button even more than usual here.

Why the Aspire S3 is quite so key-frugal is a bit of a mystery. There's a great big expanse of aluminium between the top of the keyboard and the screen, where keys would presumably have been fitted.

Of course, this could also have something to do with the Aspire S3 having to fit a graphics card, which may theoretically mandate a smaller-form keyboard. Yes, we're clutching at straws a bit here. But at worst it means the keyboard just takes a bit more getting used to, as its actual typing experience is sound. We were happy enough using as our main computer for a few days.

Trackpad

Another unfortunate effect of the keyboard's layout is that the trackpad is a little on the small side. There's plenty of room along the horizontal, but a little more room on the vertical scale would have been welcome for things like 3-finger gestures.

While clearly MacBook-inspired in its execution, the trackpad is not all that great in use either. There's a bit of pre-click give to the trackpad, and a light press actually functions as a click anyway, making the actual trackpad click a mere 'for show' extra. If this is deliberate, we'd much rather see Acer adopt a lighter trackpad action than have this odd two-stage approach.

However, the actual surface of the Aspire S3's trackpad is quite nice. It uses a similar sort of treated glass as the top Ultrabooks, offering a smooth surface that's less tacky feeling than plastic-derived trackpads.

Speakers

One thing we're quite glad to see is an absence of brand tie-ins in the Acer Aspire S3. There are no Beats by Dre speakers on this computer, sucking up even more cash as marketing spend.

However, the speakers are actually fairly good. They fire from each side of the laptop, giving at least the person using the thing a good sense of stereo.

While there isn't an extra subwoofer driver to provide actual bass (or an approximation of it), the speakers go fairly loud and offer some of the mid-range bulk that's so often missing from laptop speakers. They'll more than do the trick for the odd YouTube video. It's good to see fair speaker performance in a slim laptop that doesn't boast too much about its internal speakers.

Webcam

We have no such kind words for the webcam. You get a basic 720p webcam and its footage is very noisy with indoor lighting, where it's most likely to be used.

Stills capture is no better either – pictures are very noisy and low on detail.