Acer Aspire S3-391-6423 Review
Acer has provided for quite some time some very good MacBook Air alternatives. I am taking a look today at the 3rd generation Intel Core i3 powered Acer Aspire S3-391-6423 13.3-Inch Ultrabook.
The exterior
The Acer Aspire S3-391-6423 13.3-Inch Ultrabook comes in a champagne colored exterior case. The top cover is also brushed aluminum and the inside is shiny plastic. The black raised tile keyboard makes a nice contrast with the surrounding plastic cover and the big toutchpad in the middle ensures easy usage. Overall the entire design is very clean.
As mentioned in the beginning the Acer Aspire S3-391-6423 13.3-Inch Ultrabook is a very good MacBook Air alternative with just 0.69 inch height, compared to the Air’s 0.68 inch. Both of them have 13.3 Inch displays, with the Air having a slightly better resolution. The main difference is the price point, witch is the Acer’s main advantage. If you want a very thin Laptop with a very clean design and are not ready to pay the price of a MacBook then this is a very good alternative.
Connectivity
The Acer Aspire S3-391-6423 13.3-Inch Ultrabook has most of the needed ports available. While it has 2 USB 3.0 ports, HDMI out, a card reader, and headphones out, because of it thin design it doesn’t feature an Ethernet port or a VGA out. The VGA port can be made available by using an adapter on the HDMI port.
The memory card reader and the headphones out are the only ports on the side of the device, all the rest of them, including the power adapter are located at the back of the device. In my experience having ports at the back of a Laptop is a sure way of barking them when you least expect it.
This Ultrabook also comes with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 as standard.
The Performance
Performancewise the Acer Aspire S3-391-6423 has the most powerful 3rd Generation Intel Core i3 Mobile Ultra low voltage Processor available on the market at the moment. This, combined with the integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics card makes gaming on this device possible, but not guarantied. It will be able to play most games on minimal to medium settings if you want. Because of the very low energy needs the battery life should also be very good.
The 4GB DDR3 RAM are enough for most users and is a good match for the Intel Core i3 Processor. Users doing a lot of multitasking and running memory intensive applications will, unfortunately, have to look to a more expensive model, as this one can not support more than the preinstalled 4 GB RAM.
The best feature for this device is the 128 GB SSD. It’s really surprising that you can get an Ultrabook with a SSD priced so low. The SSD has no moving parts, like an HDD would have, and thus can offer far better writing and reading speeds. This also means that the Acer Aspire S3-391-6423 comes with Intel’s Rapid Start Technology making it start up and ready to use in mere seconds. Also, the SSD uses less energy than a HDD and this can be seen in the declared battery life of up to 6.5 hours. The installed battery is a 3-cell Li-Polymer 3260 mAh unit. Although it doesn’t sound like much, thanks to it’s Processor and the SSD it can manage very well with it.
The 128 GB of storage will probably not be enough for most people and buying either an external HDD or going for the models with HDD is recommended.