Acer Aspire S5

Find your boring old laptop a bit too chunky? Then an ultrabook should be in your sights. Acer's latest stab at making one of these super-skinny PCs is the 13.3-inch Aspire S5.

We've gone hands-on with one at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, so read on for a face-full of first impressions.

Design

Like all ultrabooks, the Aspire S5 is designed to take up as little space in your rucksack as possible. To that end it weighs a mere 1.35kg and measures 15mm at its thickest point.

Slim and sturdy, the Aspire S5 will travel well.

You'll appreciate that reduced size and weight if you're dragging the S5 around all day. This is a gadget to take a close look at if you travel a lot.

With most ultrabooks boasting extremely similar specs, the design and build quality is probably the most important thing for these little laptops to get right. We're pleased to report the S5 looks initially promising in this regard.

The S5 boasts a magnesium-alloy casing and a brushed effect to add a dash of class. It looks slightly less like a MacBook Air than other ultrabooks we've seen, lathered as it is in a sultry black.

As the Rolling Stones very nearly sang, "I see a MacBook and I want to paint it black..."

While our hands-on time was very brief, it felt sturdy enough. The casing doesn't feel too plasticky. Looking at it from the side, you can appreciate quite how slim the S5 actually is.

Acer reckons the Aspire S5 is a wizard when it comes to handling power. That means it'll resume in 1.5 seconds, ending the medieval nightmare of waiting tens of seconds for your laptop to return to an operational state.

If you fancy, you can also wake up the S5 with your smart phone using a tool called Acer Always Connect. This feature also collects social updates from Facebook, Twitter and Outlook and shows you them when the PC resumes.

Components

Expect Intel's Core iSeries processors to be lurking inside, which should make the S5 powerful enough to handle multi-tasking without breaking a sweat.

Storage comes courtesy of an SSD drive, which is faster than a traditional mechanical hard drive, and less likely to break should you drop your laptop. Handy.

The keyboard seems well spaced -- we'll see how it performs when we get the Aspire S5 in for review.

Battery life

Acer reckons the S5 will offer several weeks of battery life, but we suspect you'll only get longevity that good if you use it extremely rarely.

That said, ultrabooks we've seen so far have offered reasonably good battery life, so this machine could see you through a whole day's computing. We'll know more when we get the S5 in for review, at which point we'll force it through our gamut of battery benchmark tests.

Thunderbolt

Unusually, the Aspire S5 contains a Thunderbolt port, of the kind normally found on Apple computers like the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. That allows for extremely speedy 20Gbps data transfer, though at the moment there aren't many Thunderbolt accessories and they tend to be expensive.

Other ports include USB 3.0 and HDMI, all concealed within a hidden compartment below the Aspire S5's hinge, which pops out when you press a button to the right of the keyboard.

If you want to find a port it will be hidden behind a secret trap door at the back, making the Aspire S5 the Narnia of ultrabooks.

Hiding the ports at the back makes the S5 look sleeker around the sides, but the individual slots are a little harder to reach as a result.

Outlook

The Thunderbolt port is a tempting feature, and the dimensions certainly make it highly portable. But with so many rival ultrabooks out there, the S5 will need to impress in our benchmark tests in order to stand out.

How alluring the S5 proves to be will also depend greatly on how expensive it is. We'd love to see it hitting the shelves with a lower price tag than other ultrabooks. Stay tuned for the full review.

The S5 will start shipping at some point between April and June.