Acer Aspire 5560G
The Acer Aspire 5560G-8358G75Mnkk uses an AMD quad-core processor, the AMD A8-3500M, with each core running at 1.5GHz but capable of boosts to 2.4GHz when the going gets tough. However, when compared to Intel's quad-core i7 processors, there's no contest - the AMD chips just can't match the performance of Intel.
A WorldBench 6 score of 85 suggests that the A8-3500M can't even compete with many of Intel's dual-core i3 and i5 models in the performance stakes, although four cores is generally better than two should you want to run several programs at the same time. The generous 8GB of RAM will help here too.
The gaming performance, though, is much better than the application performance - a frame rate of 53fps in FEAR at Maximum settings is a very decent result.
The strong graphics performance is down to the dual AMD Radeon HD 6740G2 graphics setup. This actually consists of a dedicated AMD Radeon HD 6650M processor with 1GB video memory, and an integrated Radeon HD 6620G chip, configured together in a CrossFire array. This means that alternate frames are rendered by each card, which has potential performance benefits, although does also make it less power efficient.
More laptop reviews
The display, though very reflective, offers good colours and a wide viewing angle, but the 1366 x 768-pixel resolution on a 15.6in panel isn't as sharp as we'd like to see. Sound quality provided by the Dolby-licensed speakers is impressive and the Aspire does a good job of playing films, even if it sadly doesn't support the Blu-ray Disc format.
When it comes to battery life, you should get approaching 5 hours out of the Acer Aspire 5560G-8358G75Mnkk on a full charge (MobileMark 2007 reported 285 mins), which is not bad for what is ostensibly a desktop replacement.
For a 15.6in model, the Acer Aspire 5560G-8358G75Mnkk weighs a not untypical 2.6kg, so wouldn't be much trouble to carry around. It isn't the sturdiest model we've seen, with the bottom in particularly feeling quite fragile. The textured lid makes it easy to grip should you need to carry it without a case.
The Acer has a decent keyboard with lilypad-style keys that look as if they're floating above the chassis. The effect is good to look at, though slightly impractical as crumbs and other debris can find their way in rather easily. There's a numeric keypad to the right, which is handy for data entry.
The touchpad does a decent job and has a smooth surface to differentiate it from the rest of the textured chassis, so your fingers can find it while your eyes remain fixed on the screen.
Connectivity options are a little basic - there’s a choice of VGA or HDMI for connecting to a TV or monitor, but of the three USB ports, none support the latest USB 3.0 standard. All of the usual Wi-Fi standards are covered, and Bluetooth connectivity is also included. Storage is taken care of by a large 750GB hard drive, which should be enough for most users.
The Acer Aspire One Happy 2
The Acer Aspire One Happy 2 is a well built netbook with an eye pleasing design. It offers standard performance that is expected of a netbook and sells at an attractive price.
Acer always seems to bring something new with their netbooks, and it's no different this time around with the Acer Aspire One Happy 2 netbook. This unit comes with a distinctively eye catching colour choice, features the Intel Atom N570 processor and has a dual boot feature allowing the user to boot either to the Windows 7 Starter edition or Android 2.3.1 OS - booting to the latter OS would be a useful option when you want to quickly perform a basic task, such as Web browsing, without having to go through the longer process of having to wait for theWindows OS to start up to access the required functionality.
The 10.1-inch glossy screen has a native resolution of 1024x600 - as it to be expected, under certain lighting conditions, the glossy nature of the screen can be, at times, an irritant to viewing images on the screen. The screen is bright, and the viewing angles are decent: you will notice the colour of the image on the screen darken from the bottom vertical viewing angle; you will get a rather lightened view of the images when looking from the top vertical angle; the horizontal (left and right) viewing angles are comparatively better with only a slight colour distortion when looking at the screen from an angle of 60-70 degrees respective to the centre of the screen. Just like the AO722, the Happy 2's screen can be tilted to almost 150-160 degrees backward - helping you to a certain extent in choosing the ideal viewing position relative to the screen.
Keyboard Usability
The AO Happy 2 uses Acer's FineTip keyboard - the keys are rather elevated giving the impression that they're 'floating'. When considering the netbook's form factor, the keys are sufficiently well spaced. To compensate for not having a dedicated numpad, the associated number keys are printed on top of existing alphabetic keys and can be accessed through the alternate key functionality - a very handy feature that was also present on the AO 722. The keys are overall responsive, although some users might find the tactile feedback to be a tad bit too hard.
The multi-gesture enabled touchpad has a smooth texture and is quiet responsive. The glossy mouse button is also responsive and firm. Acer continues in its tradition of providing the handy functionality for disabling the touchpad - this is done by pressing the Fn and F7 buttons.
Acer Aspire S3-951
In our Acer Aspire S3 ultrabook review we find being second to market isn't always a good thing and the Acer S3-951 suffers from a lack of features and refinement.
The Acer Aspire S3-951 is the first of a new wave of Apple MacBook Air clones that have been announced by Windows PC manufacturers.
The new product category has been dubbed ultrabook by Intel, keen to keep its processor order-books filled as consumers abandon the netbook which previously propped up sales of its underpowered Intel Atom processor.
Intel is not only creating a slush fund to help incentivise this push into Apple’s ultraportable territory, it’s even handed out a blueprint notebook design for the likes of Acer, Asus and Toshiba to follow.
Acer was quick to market with its Acer Aspire S3-951, a copy of the 13in version of the Apple MacBook Air. But in order to compete with the original, Acer needs to innovate with useful technology not found in Apple’s lightweight notebook; or match the quality and sell for a much lower price. Let’s see where it’s succeeded.
Design
First impression of the Acer Aspire S3-951 with its lid closed is positive. But what appears to be an all-metal construction is soon revealed on handling to be a plastic laptop with a thin skin of brushed metal just covering the lid. The rest of the S3-951 is assembled from plastic that’s been painted a silver-grey colour to mimic the Air’s high-grade all-metal construction.
Like the Air, the closed Acer Aspire S3-951 tapers from the rear to the front, only is fatter at both edges. At its maximum at the rear, the S3-951 is 18mm against the Air’s 17mm.
In weight, Acer has patently been paring down the grams in order to beat Apple’s example, settling for 3g lighter at 1338g on the sample we reviewed.
The keyboard is like Apple’s now-familiar Scrabble tile type, but without the same precision feel. There’s a little more sponginess on these grey keys. Also troubling was the way the double-height Return was actually a single-height key. We often found ourselves hitting the ‘\’ key above, which has been shaped to look like part of the Return key.
The trackpad follows Apple’s idea of buttonless operation. Unlike the MacBook Air, multi-touch support is rather hit or miss here. Mostly the latter – you can try two-finger vertical scrolling, and pinch-to-zoom sometimes works in some apps. There’s even a four-finger swipe ro hide an open Windows program. But sideways scrolling, three-finger gestures and four-finger-and-a-thumb gestures are all absent.
Acer Aspire S5 Ultrabook Specs Announced
The Acer Aspire S5, yet another ultrabook announced at CES 2012, only 0.59” thick will be the thinnest ultrabook on the market when it is released sometime in May. The ports on Aspire S5 are located on the back and they can slide open and closed using a powered mechanism. The case is made of a magnesium-aluminum alloy so it’s going to be fairly rugged despite its ultra-thin design. Full specs for the Aspire S5 are as follows:
Processor: Intel Ivy Bridge 1.70GHz
Screen: 13.3-inches 1366 x 768 resolution
Graphics: Intel HD4000
Ports: HDMI, 2 USB 3.0 ports, ThunderBolt
Weight: 2.97lbs
Thinness: 0.59-inches
Features: MagicFlip I/O pops open ports
Battery Life: 5 hours
Those that have been able to try out the Aspire S5 have noted a couple of concerns related to its ultra thin design. First off, the case gets so thin at the end that it’s actually somewhat sharp and could be prone to causing cuts or at least unpleasant jabs if you run your wrists into it too hard. Another is that the keys on the keyboard have very little travel and it’s hard to tell when you have actually pressed a key. This is a common problem among ultrabooks, and especially so with the Aspire S3, it’s too bad Acer didn’t try to fix that issue.
There is no word on pricing at the moment, the Aspire S3 retails for $798 so we would expect the S5 to be around the $900 – $1,000 range when released in May.
The Acer Aspire 5560G-8358G75Mnkk uses an AMD quad-core processor, the AMD A8-3500M, with each core running at 1.5GHz but capable of boosts to 2.4GHz when the going gets tough. However, when compared to Intel's quad-core i7 processors, there's no contest - the AMD chips just can't match the performance of Intel.
A WorldBench 6 score of 85 suggests that the A8-3500M can't even compete with many of Intel's dual-core i3 and i5 models in the performance stakes, although four cores is generally better than two should you want to run several programs at the same time. The generous 8GB of RAM will help here too.
The gaming performance, though, is much better than the application performance - a frame rate of 53fps in FEAR at Maximum settings is a very decent result.
The strong graphics performance is down to the dual AMD Radeon HD 6740G2 graphics setup. This actually consists of a dedicated AMD Radeon HD 6650M processor with 1GB video memory, and an integrated Radeon HD 6620G chip, configured together in a CrossFire array. This means that alternate frames are rendered by each card, which has potential performance benefits, although does also make it less power efficient.
More laptop reviews
The display, though very reflective, offers good colours and a wide viewing angle, but the 1366 x 768-pixel resolution on a 15.6in panel isn't as sharp as we'd like to see. Sound quality provided by the Dolby-licensed speakers is impressive and the Aspire does a good job of playing films, even if it sadly doesn't support the Blu-ray Disc format.
When it comes to battery life, you should get approaching 5 hours out of the Acer Aspire 5560G-8358G75Mnkk on a full charge (MobileMark 2007 reported 285 mins), which is not bad for what is ostensibly a desktop replacement.
For a 15.6in model, the Acer Aspire 5560G-8358G75Mnkk weighs a not untypical 2.6kg, so wouldn't be much trouble to carry around. It isn't the sturdiest model we've seen, with the bottom in particularly feeling quite fragile. The textured lid makes it easy to grip should you need to carry it without a case.
The Acer has a decent keyboard with lilypad-style keys that look as if they're floating above the chassis. The effect is good to look at, though slightly impractical as crumbs and other debris can find their way in rather easily. There's a numeric keypad to the right, which is handy for data entry.
The touchpad does a decent job and has a smooth surface to differentiate it from the rest of the textured chassis, so your fingers can find it while your eyes remain fixed on the screen.
Connectivity options are a little basic - there’s a choice of VGA or HDMI for connecting to a TV or monitor, but of the three USB ports, none support the latest USB 3.0 standard. All of the usual Wi-Fi standards are covered, and Bluetooth connectivity is also included. Storage is taken care of by a large 750GB hard drive, which should be enough for most users.
The Acer Aspire One Happy 2
Acer always seems to bring something new with their netbooks, and it's no different this time around with the Acer Aspire One Happy 2 netbook. This unit comes with a distinctively eye catching colour choice, features the Intel Atom N570 processor and has a dual boot feature allowing the user to boot either to the Windows 7 Starter edition or Android 2.3.1 OS - booting to the latter OS would be a useful option when you want to quickly perform a basic task, such as Web browsing, without having to go through the longer process of having to wait for theWindows OS to start up to access the required functionality.
Design
The Acer Aspire One Happy 2 model comes in four 'fruity' colours, namely Banana Cream, Strawberry Yoghurt, Blueberry Shake and Papaya Milk - one could be forgiven for thinking that Acer had a tie up with some fruit juice manufacturer for releasing this netbook. The review unit I received had the glossy Papaya Milk shading, which covers the back-lid, the power button and the touchpad and mouse button, with the rest of the netbook retaining a white matte finish - the screen bezel had a white glossy finish. As is to be expected, the glossy areas do attract a lot of smudges and finger prints - but on the sections coloured in Papaya Milk, the shading does offset the visibility of these smudges to an extent from certain viewing angles. Also, just like the Acer Aspire One 722 netbook that we had reviewed earlier, this netbook also features the attractive droplet design on its backlid.
MonitorThe 10.1-inch glossy screen has a native resolution of 1024x600 - as it to be expected, under certain lighting conditions, the glossy nature of the screen can be, at times, an irritant to viewing images on the screen. The screen is bright, and the viewing angles are decent: you will notice the colour of the image on the screen darken from the bottom vertical viewing angle; you will get a rather lightened view of the images when looking from the top vertical angle; the horizontal (left and right) viewing angles are comparatively better with only a slight colour distortion when looking at the screen from an angle of 60-70 degrees respective to the centre of the screen. Just like the AO722, the Happy 2's screen can be tilted to almost 150-160 degrees backward - helping you to a certain extent in choosing the ideal viewing position relative to the screen.
Keyboard Usability
The AO Happy 2 uses Acer's FineTip keyboard - the keys are rather elevated giving the impression that they're 'floating'. When considering the netbook's form factor, the keys are sufficiently well spaced. To compensate for not having a dedicated numpad, the associated number keys are printed on top of existing alphabetic keys and can be accessed through the alternate key functionality - a very handy feature that was also present on the AO 722. The keys are overall responsive, although some users might find the tactile feedback to be a tad bit too hard.
The multi-gesture enabled touchpad has a smooth texture and is quiet responsive. The glossy mouse button is also responsive and firm. Acer continues in its tradition of providing the handy functionality for disabling the touchpad - this is done by pressing the Fn and F7 buttons.
In our Acer Aspire S3 ultrabook review we find being second to market isn't always a good thing and the Acer S3-951 suffers from a lack of features and refinement.
The Acer Aspire S3-951 is the first of a new wave of Apple MacBook Air clones that have been announced by Windows PC manufacturers.
The new product category has been dubbed ultrabook by Intel, keen to keep its processor order-books filled as consumers abandon the netbook which previously propped up sales of its underpowered Intel Atom processor.
Intel is not only creating a slush fund to help incentivise this push into Apple’s ultraportable territory, it’s even handed out a blueprint notebook design for the likes of Acer, Asus and Toshiba to follow.
Acer was quick to market with its Acer Aspire S3-951, a copy of the 13in version of the Apple MacBook Air. But in order to compete with the original, Acer needs to innovate with useful technology not found in Apple’s lightweight notebook; or match the quality and sell for a much lower price. Let’s see where it’s succeeded.
Design
First impression of the Acer Aspire S3-951 with its lid closed is positive. But what appears to be an all-metal construction is soon revealed on handling to be a plastic laptop with a thin skin of brushed metal just covering the lid. The rest of the S3-951 is assembled from plastic that’s been painted a silver-grey colour to mimic the Air’s high-grade all-metal construction.
Like the Air, the closed Acer Aspire S3-951 tapers from the rear to the front, only is fatter at both edges. At its maximum at the rear, the S3-951 is 18mm against the Air’s 17mm.
In weight, Acer has patently been paring down the grams in order to beat Apple’s example, settling for 3g lighter at 1338g on the sample we reviewed.
The keyboard is like Apple’s now-familiar Scrabble tile type, but without the same precision feel. There’s a little more sponginess on these grey keys. Also troubling was the way the double-height Return was actually a single-height key. We often found ourselves hitting the ‘\’ key above, which has been shaped to look like part of the Return key.
The trackpad follows Apple’s idea of buttonless operation. Unlike the MacBook Air, multi-touch support is rather hit or miss here. Mostly the latter – you can try two-finger vertical scrolling, and pinch-to-zoom sometimes works in some apps. There’s even a four-finger swipe ro hide an open Windows program. But sideways scrolling, three-finger gestures and four-finger-and-a-thumb gestures are all absent.
Acer Aspire S5 Ultrabook Specs Announced
The Acer Aspire S5, yet another ultrabook announced at CES 2012, only 0.59” thick will be the thinnest ultrabook on the market when it is released sometime in May. The ports on Aspire S5 are located on the back and they can slide open and closed using a powered mechanism. The case is made of a magnesium-aluminum alloy so it’s going to be fairly rugged despite its ultra-thin design. Full specs for the Aspire S5 are as follows:
Processor: Intel Ivy Bridge 1.70GHz
Screen: 13.3-inches 1366 x 768 resolution
Graphics: Intel HD4000
Ports: HDMI, 2 USB 3.0 ports, ThunderBolt
Weight: 2.97lbs
Thinness: 0.59-inches
Features: MagicFlip I/O pops open ports
Battery Life: 5 hours
Those that have been able to try out the Aspire S5 have noted a couple of concerns related to its ultra thin design. First off, the case gets so thin at the end that it’s actually somewhat sharp and could be prone to causing cuts or at least unpleasant jabs if you run your wrists into it too hard. Another is that the keys on the keyboard have very little travel and it’s hard to tell when you have actually pressed a key. This is a common problem among ultrabooks, and especially so with the Aspire S3, it’s too bad Acer didn’t try to fix that issue.
There is no word on pricing at the moment, the Aspire S3 retails for $798 so we would expect the S5 to be around the $900 – $1,000 range when released in May.
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