I don’t intend to cover all the country launch dates of all the Ultrabooks here on Ultrabooknews but some will be important enough to report. Like this one – the first official announcement of price and availability in Europe pf the Acer Aspire S3. From this news you’ll get a good idea of price and availability across the whole of Europe.
We’re looking at an initial availability of one Acer Aspire S3 model on 20th October. It’s a Core i5 version (i5-2467M) at 1.6 Ghz with the hybrid SSD+HDD (320GB storage) for an impressive €799. Acer have gone for processing power and storage over connectivity though because there’s no Ethernet port or USB3.0 which will put some off. [Note that many places are reporting Ethernet 10/100/1000 but we can’t find the port – we’re trying to track down the details on this] It’s not the lightest either at a slightly hefty 1.4KG. In comparison, the Toshiba Z830 comes in at slightly over 1.1KG – a difference you’ll notice.
As far as it is possible to tell, there’s no Wi-Di or backlit keyboard. Screen resolution is 1366×768 compared to the Asus UX31 which has 1600×900.
Battery life is a claimed 6 hours but with a 36.4wh battery we can already tell you that the average in-use battery life will be around 4 hours. Gaming – 1.5-2hrs max. For a 1.4KG device, this figure should be better.
If the hybrid SSD/HDD really brings in the fast start-up times and you’re not looking for Ethernet or Wi-Di, this will make a stylish choice but of course, only a detailed review is going to give you the final decision-making details.
Thanks for Notebookitalia for the heads-up. Check out their article for a few Italian shop links and confirmation that variants of this model (the full-SSD and Core i7 versions we believe) will be available before the end of the year.
