Acer Aspire S5 Review: A Serious MacBook Air Challenger

PCWorld - If you're looking for an Ultrabook with the superslim good looks of a MacBook Air, enough computing oomph to handle multimedia and general business tasks, plus a good-enough battery life, take a long hard look at the Acer Aspire S5. Especially the superslim good looks part.

The S5 is less than three quarters of an inch at its thickest and weighs 2.6 pounds--impressively light for a notebook with a 13.3-inch display. In almost every way, the S5 fulfills the promise of the Ultrabook as articulated by Intel: It's extremely portable, very fast, and endowed with decent battery life.

True, you can find several Ultrabooks with better battery life, and maybe one or two with superior performance--and the Aspire S5 has its fair share of minor drawbacks. But none of the ones we've seen are thinner.

That's thanks in no small part to an innovative motorized panel that Acer calls the MagicFlip, which rolls down to conceal ports on the rear bottom edge. This both protects them when not in use and slims down the S5's profile so it's both thinner and lighter than the current 13.3-inch MacBook Air.

But the motor makes a somewhat grating noise, and sometimes it seemed to roll up of its own volition. Also, I worry that the motor, activated by a button on the top right of the platen, adds one more part that could break.

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Apple trots out new MacBook Airs with Ivy Bridge

Dell XPS 13: Does it rival MacBook Air? (full review)

The good: The Dell XPS 13 fits a glass-covered 13-inch screen into a smaller-than-expected body. The sophisticated design is eye-catching and sturdy, without driving up the price.

The bad: The limited port selection doesn’t include HDMI or an SD card slot; the display should be better; and battery life falls behind other slim laptops’.

The bottom line: Dell packs a 13-inch display into a very small footprint in the XPS 13 ultrabook, making it one of the few slim laptops that actually tops the MacBook Air in some areas.

Read the Full Review

Top-10 must-have gadgets

 
CNET has top products lists for each of the categories we cover–they’re listed on the left–but this list brings the cream of the crop together in one place. For September, new additions include the Sonos Play:3 streaming audio speaker, the Droid Bionic superphone, and the Roku 2 XS streaming video box. (Looking for the iPhone 4 or iPod Touch? We deliberately left them off the list, since their 2011 replacement models are imminent.) Rather than trying to compare gadgets across multiple categories, we present them in alphabetical order, because when you get right down to it, we think they’re all must-haves.

Apple iPad 2 (16GB, Wi-Fi)

The iPad 2 refines an already excellent product. Its easy-to-use interface, vast app catalog, and marathon battery life bolster Apple’s claim to being the king of tablets.
Price: $499.00 – $1,050.00 (check prices)

• 4.0 stars Excellent

Read full review

Apple MacBook Air (11-inch, Summer 2011)

This year’s 11-inch MacBook Air improves on last year’s model in several significant ways and is by far the fastest ultraportable you’re likely to find, though some users will consider the limited flash storage space to be a hindrance.
Price: $949.95 – $999.00 (check prices)

• 4.0 stars Excellent

Read full review

Barnes & Noble Nook Touch Reader (Wi-Fi)

The new touch-screen Nook is a major advancement over its predecessor and offers some real advantages over the current Kindle.
Price: $139.00 (check prices)

• 4.0 stars Excellent

Read full review

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MacBook Air, OS X Lion due next week?

Probably not coincidentally, the OS X Lion page on Apple's 
site shows the new operating system running on the MacBook Air.

(Credit: Apple)

CNET - The ides of July are almost upon us. And that can mean only thing: the arrival of OS X Lion with the refreshed MacBook Air in tow. At least, that's what two Apple enthusiast sites are reporting.

9to5Mac says that a "few overseas sources" tell them that "Apple Retail stores are planning 'overnights' on July 13th." Overnights typically entail a refresh of Apple store displays and training on new products.

And AppleInsider is hearing similar chatter, citing a "bulletin" posted to Apple's internal retail news network "advising store management to perform RAM upgrades to certain Mac models on the showroom floors by Sunday, July 10th at the latest." The deduction: this is needed to ready those models for upgrades to Lion.     More