Acer Timeline Ultra M5

This is the Acer Timeline Ultra M5 and thanks to Acer I get to have a closer look at it and see what it’s like. Not only am I looking at the machine, but I also get to play around with Windows 8. Let’s first take a look at what this M5 packs under its hood. Intel® Core™ i7-3517U 6GB DDR3 Memory 500GB Hard Drive nVidia GT 640M 15.6” LED LCD HD Display 2-in-1 Card Reader 1x USB2 port, 2x USB3 ports Ethernet Port HDMI Output DVDRW Drive All this packed into a relative light thin and lightweight unit. The casing of the laptop is made out of plastic so a lot of the light weight does factor from that. It is classified as an Ultrabook although at 15.6” screen size it feels a little too big to called one. I prefer to see it as a ultraportable laptop than an Ultrabook. Looking at the unit with the lid closed we see a pretty slick looking laptop. You’ll find the card reader and the DVD drive on either side of the unit with all the ports on the back which is one of the downsides of the unit. It is pretty unpractical to reach behind the laptop to plug in USB devices. It also concerns me to see them at the back considering the fan exhausts are located at the rear and all of the hot air gets pushed out next to the USB ports. What I would like to have seen is the DVD drive be gone with and the full array of ports to replace it. DVD drives are becoming less and less used these days with almost every bit of content available for digital purchasing and downloading. Opening the lid reveals more of the simple elegance that makes this laptop stand out. It is all the same material inside and out, it doesn’t have a dozen stickers on the wrist rest area that makes it look like a children’s book and it has one of the best looking backlit illuminations I’ve seen since the Macbook Pro’s. The display area is fantastic as it has a black border behind the actual glass area and around the physical display. This is an underrated feature as a solid black or white colour around displays is proven to improve the contrast of the screen from its surroundings, making anything you watch or do appear that little bit extra visually compelling.  Performance of the laptop was equally impressive. Booting up the unit came in at around 6-7 seconds thanks to the 20GB Cache SSD that acts like your standard memory but instead caches the important files that help it boot up and awake from sleep almost instantly. The keyboard is great to type on and feels very soft and quiet. The track pad although is one of the better ones I’ve used is pretty large and leaves no room for your wrist to rest on. I ran a few benchmarking tests to see how the i7 and GT 640M are going to be perform and it did remarkably well. Unigine:  Score 703 Avg. FPS: 27.9 3DMark11 P1960 PCMark07 2908 Pretty decent scores to say the least and with gaming benchmark scores like that is can easily be said that this laptop can used by a moderate and casual gamer. However be careful with temps as the plastic casing has terrible heat dissipation properties and the base of the unit can get hot. A laptop like this coupled with a decent laptop cooler (Thermaltake Massive23) would be a match made in heaven. If you’re a non-gamer, don’t stress as this laptop has plenty of juice for the office worker and business professional. With a decent battery lasting well above standard laptops, portability and performance capabilities of this laptop make it a great option for on-the-go business. The full sized 15.6” display with sharp and crisp colours means you can present all your work on something other than some of those smaller laptops with screens less than 14 inches. That’s the laptop, now I want to quickly go over Windows 8 for a bit. In the office here it was a bit of a mixed reaction. It was either you didn’t like it at all, or you didn’t mind it at all. For me it was the first. I felt the whole replacement of the Start menu was completely unnecessary. The Start menu is now a bunch of tiles of your favourite apps. What ticked me off the most was the requirement to sign up to a Microsoft account to use things like the Calender! I’m sorry but that it is completely bonkers and beyond stupid. It takes an extra step or two to do basic things and the overall feel of it is no longer like using Windows. If users struggled to learn Windows 7 and earlier operating systems, they are going to loath Windows 8. It seems like Microsoft changed everything just because they had no other plan or idea on what to do with the Windows operating system. It also looks a bit lazy to see that they have created one operating system to work on multiple platforms like Mobile and tablets. Windows 8 just did not cut it for me and I will definitely not be making the switch to it. The laptop on the other hand is fantastic! Its fast, its slick, its portable and it looks good doing it! Acer really has surprised me with this one and it is good to see! More information will be released as soon as it is ready for public release. So if you’re looking for a laptop upgrade, you may want to wait for this release. sahin.s@centrecom.com.au

Acer Aspire S3 Ultrabook Review!

Acer’s not so ultra Ultrabook

Today’s brand new unit from Acer is the base model from its Ultrabook Aspire S Series. Although it looks like an Ultrabook, the internals of it doesn’t resemble one. So let’s take a look at what it is capable of.

Let’s take a look at the specs.

Model: Aspire S3-951-2364G34
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
CPU: Intel® Core™ i3-2367M (1.4GHz)
Memory: 4GB DDR3 (1333MHz)
Hard Drive(s): 320GB 5400RPM (20GB SSD Cache)
Optical Drive(s): None
Networking: 802.11b/g/n Wireless
Graphics: Intel HD3000
Display: 13.3” HD LCD (1366x768 Resolution)
Audio: Dolby Advanced
Coms: Bluetooth 4.0
Camera: Built-in
Inputs: 2x USB2.0,  Microphone Built-in, SD Card Reader
Outputs: 1x Headphone Out, 1x HDMI
Battery: 3-cell

Packaging on the A3 was very pretty and neat. The unit comes wrapped in a soft white cotton sleave and when revealed shows its true beauty. The silver brushed finish looks and feels fantastic. Looking back in the box you’ll find the usual accessories including manuals and warranty cards all packaged up underneath the laptops housing. Admiring the unit you’ll notice the rear plate is where the action is featuring standard-laptop-issue black plastic housing the power and connectivity ports and an exhaust. Not something all Ultrabooks would usually feature. You can’t help but feel slightly disappointed that having stretched the same silver lining along the back. The black plastic on Ultrabooks just reminds you of the sluggish notebooks you’ve always been carrying around, and let’s face it, when you have one of these; you want to forget about the past.

Opening the lid reveals the inner beauty of an Ultrabook. Slick, simple and impressive, the power button is featured blow the displays folding edge and sits at an angle which faces you directly. The keyboard is quite compact and features the traditional ‘Fn’ key to perform dual actions on single keys. This is where the beauty kind of lapses a bit. Typing on the keyboard is not as good as I’d expected. I found myself missing a lot of keys and not every key press registering the first time. It just lacked a finesse which one would expect that separates it from the rest of the herd. The track pad was even less impressive. Although it was very responsive with clicking, movement on the unit just was awkward and lacked any smoothness.

Lack of an SSD sees the unit boot up in around the 40sec mark, something most Core i7 processors already do. But once you’re ready to go, using it is not only a breeze but feels good. When in your hands the super light weightiness of it makes it feel like you’re holding a mobile phone or tablet. However, where this unit completely disappointed me was with its battery life. As an Ultrabook, it needs to rate at a minimum of 5 hours, however after 2hrs and 20min later, the unit was off. Now an important thing is what exactly was I doing to kill the battery that quickly? Well, I did things any average person would do. I browsed the internet on non-flash websites, I watched less than a handful of music videos on YouTube, watched parts of a movie by scrubbing through every few minutes, read a few emails, did general Windows tasks, and that was it. With tasks like this, the 2hour mark is what you would expect from standard 15” notebooks which they do, however I think what also contributes to this A3’s performance with its battery is the fact that it is only a 3-cell battery drawing up to 65w of power, compared to a Zenbook drawing only 35w, almost half the rating.

 

EDIT: Since writing the article, Acer has informed me that the laptop features an on board 20GB SSD. Let’s just clarify that, the 20GB is completely unusable and unreachable. It merely acts as a solid state memory module allowing it to resume instantaneously. It does not assist in boot-up or general computer use.

 

Overall, this laptop has quite the specific target market. For those who are after a unit that is extremely portable and stylish with enough features to run basic web applications, this could be of interest to you, however if your someone who multi-tasks a few load-heavy programs or enjoys watching a few movies or TV shows on the go, this is potentially a hit and miss.