Acer Aspire S3-392G review

Acer Aspire S3-392G review
Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Acer Laptop Battery
Acer's S3 has always been one of the more affordable Ultrabook models on the market, partly because it used a conventional hard drive rather than more expensive solid-state storage.
This latest laptop is a little more expensive than some of its predecessors, but enhances performance with a hybrid disk/flashstorage drive and – unusually for an Ultrabook – it has a dedicated nVidia GPU.
The brushed-metal aluminium design of previous models has been changed – probably to fend off the frequent comparisons with Apple's MacBook Air – and the screen is now backed by the same distinctive white panel as Acer's with battery such as Acer AS07A31 Battery, Acer AS07A51 Battery, Acer Aspire 4520 Battery, Acer AS07B72 Battery, Acer Aspire 5520 Battery, Acer BTP-43D1 Battery, Acer TravelMate 220 Battery, Acer BTP-58A1 Battery, acer BTP-60A1 Battery, Acer TravelMate 240 Battery, Acer AS10B5E Battery, Acer AS10B75 Batterymore expensive S7 range.
This Aspire S3 looks very smart and stylish. It measures just 18 mm thick and weighs 1.65 kg, so it's easy to carry around when you're on the move. Acer pays good attention to detail too, with features such as the ‘wobble-free' hinge that holds the screen firmly in position as you adjust the viewing angle.
You won't need to do that very often, though, as the 13.3-inch IPS panel is bright and colourful and provides excellent all-round viewing angles. The screen is touch-sensitive and we were also pleased to see that the low 1366 x 768 resolution of last year's model has now been updated to full-HD's 1920 x 1080. It'll work very well for web browsing and streaming video, as well as business presentations or just browsing your photo library. See also: Group test: what's the best high-end laptop?
The speakers were also a pleasant surprise – the bass, inevitably, could be a little stronger, but the S3 produced a firm sound with enough volume that we had to turn it down on occasion as it was too loud for use in our office.
The keyboard may not suit everyone, though. The key pitch – the distance between the centre points of adjacent keys – is a standard 19mm, but the top row of Function keys is missing altogether.
This means that some keys – such as the Esc key – have been squeezed onto other rows, which results in the left-hand Caps Lock and Shift keys being unusually small. It gives the keyboard a rather cramped feel, and isn't helped by the way that other functions, such as the Mute and Wi-Fi controls, are scattered to unfamiliar locations around the rest of the keyboard.
We were also disappointed to see that the S3 doesn't include any ethernet port. Instead it relies on Acer's proprietary Convertor Port, which requires a £20 adaptor in order to get fully wired.
This latest model appears to be available in just a single configuration at the moment, priced at £900 with a Haswell-generation Intel Core i5 processor running at 1.6 GHz, 4 GB of memory and 500 GB solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD). The Seagate hard disk runs at the usual 5400 rpm, and is backed up by a 16 GB solid-state module that does a very effective job of boosting performance.
As a result, the Aspire S3 scored a respectable 4282 points when running the general-purpose PCMark 7 benchtest. That will be more than adequate for most routine computing tasks, such as web browsing or running Microsoft Office.
The increased performance of the SSHD was noticeable in other areas too, as the S3 woke from sleep in just a couple of seconds and only took 10 seconds to boot into the Start screen, when using the default Windows 8 ‘fast start' option. See also: Group test: what's the best ultraportable laptop?