Laptop & Tablet Parts
Desktop & All-in-one Parts
Dell Server Parts
Can Acer keep the price of the Aspire S5, world's thinnest ultrabook at 15-millimeters, to less than a stack of twenty-dollar-bills about 18-millimeters thick? That would be approximately one-thousand US dollars, and slightly thicker than the S5. If the answer is yes, Acer may have leaped to the front of the sizable crowd of companies rushing to market with Intel-branded Ultrabooks, and the generic category of ultrathins with AMD chips.
Measured at its thickest point that 15mm is 2mm thinner than the Apple MacBook Air, making it the slimmest laptop on the planet, and weighs less than three pounds. The Acer Aspire S5 should be available to consumers in the second quarter of 2012, but a price has not yet been released.
Specifications
Acer is keeping most of the specs off the radar for now. The S5 is expected to have both USB 3.0 and a blazing fast Thunderbolt port, HDMI, Dolby sound, Solid State Drive (SSD), Ivy Bridge CPU, support for DirectX 11, and good shock resistance. The powersmart battery should provide three times the run-time typically associated with a standard battery of the same size.
Acer's Always Connect technology provides access to data and multimedia files remotely from smartphones and tablets. The company's Green-Instant-On feature provides resume from sleep response time of about 1.5 seconds.
Tying all that together is the AcerCloud computing service to be sold with all their PCs beginning early in 2012. Files can be retrieved via Wi-Fi even when the PC is hibernating or on standby, and will be compatible with Android, or any Windows 8 device.
Assessment
Creative Strategies, Tim Bajarin said: "....it sets the bar for the rest of the ultrabook vendors"....The real battle is not with Apple, it is with all the other vendors coming out with Windows ultrabooks".
J.T. Wang, Acer's CEO said ultrabooks will comprise more than a third of their product line by the end of 2012, with four models by the second quarter. Wang said Google can take care of Android, Microsoft will take care of Windows devices, and Acer will take care of in between, making Android work well with Windows, and also other platforms.
The Incoming Tidal-Wave of Ultrathins and Ultrabooks, we discussed in an earlier article, is now coming into full view.
