Acer’s first Ultrabook, the Aspire S5, also happens to be one of the first of what will certainly be a tidal wave of Ultrabooks announced at CES this year. It’s just 15mm thick at its largest point, and weighs in at less than 3 pounds. But it’s probably only going to hold that “world’s thinnest” title for a few hours until the Ultrabook floodgates open. Tick tock.
One of the ways it manages to stay so thin is with what Acer is calling a “Magical I/O port panel” which drops down just below the hinge, exposing an HDMI, USB 3.0 and 20Gbps Thunderbolt-which will probably be a recurring theme this year.
An Intel Core processor (likey an Ivy Bridge given the Thunderbolt port) and an SSD provides power saving benefits, while the Acer Green Instant ON feature promises almost instant resumes from sleep. And by instant, they of course don’t mean instant, but a respectable 1.5 seconds.
It’s also got Acer’s Always Connect functionality, which ties into their new AcerCloud service. It takes a three prong approach to syncing media and files across devices, including features called clear.fi Photo, clear.Fi Media, and AcerCloud Docs. The company says that Microsoft will provide this for windows and Google will do the same for Android (and Apple obviously already does as well), but that Acer will “take care of the in-between.” Whoever that is.
The Aspire S5 will be available sometime in the second quarter of this year, with pricing to be announced. And Acer also confirmed-not surprisingly-that they’ll be following up with Windows 8 ultrabooks in the second half of the year. [Acer]