Two key features of ultrabooks are an instant-on function and long battery life. In the case of the Aspire S3, both of these are tied up in Intel's new Rapid Start Technology (RST). Part of that tech includes a timed sleep mode - after a certain period in regular sleep mode (configurable as either 2 or 8 hours), it drops into a zero-power form of hibernation. We tested this by charging the S3 to 100% and leaving it in sleep mode for 16 hours.
On return, the battery had only dropped to 95%, while waking the S3 back up took around 10 to 15 seconds. RST appears to work by dumping the current memory contents onto a small 20GB solid-state drive (SSD) as it moves into zero- power mode. This drive doesn't appear in Windows Explorer and looks to be designed exclusively for RST use. For general storage, there's a 320GB Hitachi HTS543232 SATA hard drive.
The Aspire S3 also features Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (64-bit) alongside 4GB of DDR3-1333 memory. You only get Intel HD integrated graphics and there's no optical drive. Application performance is roughly equivalent to a budget 2.1GHz Core i3-2310M notebook, with our UserBench Encode HD media- encoding benchmark reaching just under 49. On our tough UserBench Battery test, the S3 lasted 3 hours 29 minutes, a decent result given its overall CPU speed and size. However, like the MacBook Air, the battery is not removable. The S3's chassis is an aluminium base surrounding a 13.3in widescreen 1,366 x 768-pixel LCD panel. The S3 is still thicker than the Air, but more curved at the edges, so there's less room for peripheral ports. In fact, you only get a headphone socket on one side and SDHC card reader on the other. On the back, you'll find two USB 2.0 ports and a full-sized HDMI output. Weight comes in at 1.36kg.
