The Aspire S3 is Acer’s first ultrabook. The notebook is almost unabashedly a MacBook Air clone with straight lines and a clean design but it’s also $400 less. There are some trade-offs when comparing this to the Air, sure, but for the most part the Aspire S3 is a fine ultraportible for the Windows crowd.

What Acer and all the rest of the ultrabook makers are building are by all accounts fine computers but will no doubt catch flack because of their similarities to the MacBook Air. The Aspire S3 isn’t a MacBook Air killer. Not alone at least. This notebook gives me hope that the PC isn’t dead and ultrabooks will be the genesis of this revival.

Lookin’ Good

It’s hard to dismiss the MacBook Air as the S3′s inspiration. It’s a virtual clone if you replace the MBA’s aluminum skin with plastic, ditch the backlit keyboard and replace the glowing Apple logo with a shiny Acer one. That’s fine with me. Acer got the major points right. The S3 is lightweight, surprisingly rigid and sports a quality multitouch trackpad.

The S3 is .51-inches thick. That’s .17mm thinner than the MacBook Air at its thickest point. But unlike the MBA or the recently announced Asus Zenbook, the S3 is nearly the same thickness throughout; it’s not tapered to a sharp point. But with a notebook this thin, these tiny details do not really matter. The S3 is just a touch thicker than two iPads 2. It also weighs a mere 2.98 lbs.

Acer pulled off a sort of coup with the S3. This ultrabook has perhaps the best trackpad I’ve ever used on a Windows notebook. The multitouch gestures simply work without a learning curve. The whole trackpad wiggles a bit in a way that’s not necessarily bad, but initially unsettling. The trackpad is so good that it tricks my brain and when I need to right click, my left hand constantly wonders up to the Ctrl and Alt button as if I was on a Mac – I forget this trackpad has a real right click button! I am thoroughly impressed with the trackpad.

Then there’s the screen. The S3 uses a rather low resolution 13-inch LED backlit display. The colors and clarity are just fine, but the 1366 x 768 resolution leaves me wanting more. That’s the same resolution used in the 11-inch MBA — the 13-inch uses a 1440 x 900 which lends greatly to its high-end feel. The S3′s low resolution screen is adequate just not exceptional. Plus, the viewing angle is poor and to make matters worse, the lid’s hinge is loose so it tends to fall forwards or backwards when jarred.

Think that’s bad? The S3 has a set of Dolby certified speakers, but you’ll get better sound out of a thrift store harmonica. They’re that bad, which frustrates me considering the Dolby logo printed right by the S3′s power button. Dolby seemingly sells licences more freely than George Lucas pimps Star Wars. If this is Dolby-approved sound, then Dolby clearly endorses horrible sound.

Battery Is King

Acer proudly touts that the S3 can last six hours on a charge. That claim puts the S3 on par with the MacBook Air’s 5-7 hour life. Unfortunately I never saw six hours of life during my testing. A day of normal activities consisting of mainly Internet browsing resulted in a 5 hour battery life. I only saw 3:30 hours when stress testing the notebook by playing 1080p movies over WiFi. (all of Mallrats and part of Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood)

The shorter than advertised battery life is to be expected, though. Where Apple takes great pride in advertising real-life battery stats, Windows PC makers seem to state lives that are only achievable when the notebook is at its lowest brightness and sitting near ideal. Still, the five-hour battery life is below average in the ultraportable scene even though it’s still a good amount of time.

Thin notebooks generally get toasty. The S3 does not. It stays at a comfortable temperature thanks to a fan that kicks on a few minutes after opening the lid. But even the MacBook Air has a fan. After all, there’s a good deal of powerful computing hardware crammed into an area measured by cubic millimeters. At this point ultraportables either have a fan or they double as an Easy Bake Skillet.

Intel Inside

The Aspire S3 rocks a mobile 1.6GHz Core i5-2467M CPU with 4GB of RAM. This little guy handled all my daily tasks that admittedly consists just of Google Reader and Reddit combined with a fair amount of YouTube videos sourced from both. Photoshop runs well enough for simple edits, but I wouldn’t want to compose a huge image — partly because of the low-res screen. Future versions in Acer’s ultrabook line will include Core i3 and i7 CPUs, which depending on your poison, will either provide better battery life at the cost of raw power, or likewise, a shorter battery life in return for faster CPU cycles.

Not surprisingly, the S3 isn’t a gaming machine but it runs less-demanding games like Portal and Starcraft just fine. Don’t expect to play BF3 on here.

Intel designed the ultrabook platform to be quick where it’s most obvious: system start-up and resuming. Acer took it one step farther and included several proprietary software packs to make it even quicker. The included SSD helps, too. It takes about 1 second to resume the system when opening the lid. A system boot took an average of 34 seconds from hitting the power button to seeing the WiFi reconnect. It’s clearly far from instant-on but it’s nearly an instant resume, which is more important to daily usage anyway.

Part of the quickness comes from a 20GB SSD that holds just the important system files. A traditional 320GB spinning disk hard drive handles file storage and additional software installations. This unconventional affair is hidden to the user and only one disk shows up in My Computer. Strangely, despite 3rd party confirmation of these hard drives from HD Tune Pro, only 283 GBs show as the total system storage — and that seemingly includes the Windows 7 install.

But This Is An Acer

Buy a Mac and you get OS X and several first party software titles. Buy an Acer (or HP, Dell or most others) and you get a computer loaded with unsolicited software. This notebook comes with at least a dozen bloatware titles including McAfee Internet Protection and Norton Online Backup. (side question: why does McAfee insist on running inside of Chrome as a plug-in? fear mongering) I’ve only had the computer a few days and I’m constantly bombed with software updates, required restarts and random program notification pop-ups. These sponsored offers allow computer manufacturers to sneak in extra revenue and keep prices low, but there has to be a better way that doesn’t require an owner to spend an hour uninstalling software on his new computer.

The S3 is a winner. It’s relatively low $899 price puts the ultrabook $400 less than a comparable MacBook Air. Plus it runs Windows, which, and I know this may be a shocker to some, is a big advantage for a large cohort of consumers. But the S3 isn’t the only ultrabook out there and if you need some extra power, it might do to wait. Nearly every computer manufacturer is launching a full line of ultrabooks. Acer has an early advantage of hitting retailers before Dell or HP who are expected to enter the game late this year or early next. But Lenovo, Toshiba, Asus, and Samsung are all launching ultrabooks in the coming weeks, so the competition is looming.

This notebook lives up to my rather high expectations. I’m a bit disappointed by the screen, but it’s far from a deal breaker in my opinion. The S3′s trackpad rocks, the notebook stays at a comfortable temperature and the long battery life makes it an all-day companion. I was quiet pleased and, in the end, it’s not just another MacBook Air lookalike.

Product Page

Along with these changes Amazon has also rejiggered its pricing tiers; adding a new tier at 1 Terabyte, and removing the 50-100 Terabyte tier, therefore extending the volume discounts to more users.

Amazon, which recently introduced a ‘Free Usage Tier’ for AWS Amazon, is continuing to drive down the developer costs for storing existing data, emphasizing the advantages of using cloud computing versus a fixed hard drive for storage.

Here’s a rundown of the new pricing format:

You can find further details on AWS S3 pricing here.

The API allows user’s to programmatically control their GoGrid environment. This allows users to, for example, auto-scale the GoGrid instance in a timely and efficient manner. The API also enables users to script and chain various commands. For instance, one can simply type “get” available unused IP addresses, “add” a server with unassigned IP, “power” a server when it is ready, etc. It can also be used by resellers to skin their own portals, and allows for 3rd party developers to create management tools for GoGrid instances. It requires no knowledge of WSDL, CORBA or RMI to use, and supports API calls from Java, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby and C# as well as shell scripting language like bash.

GoGrid delivers similar on-demand, pay-by-the-hour server hosting as Amazon’s EC2, but uniquely offers a web-based GUI, Windows Cloud servers, free load balancing, and free support deals.

Not to be confused with the PEBL, the Samsung Pebble music player is about the size of the iPod Shuffle and features the same basic button layout although this model has a few EQ presets for the EQ inclined. The players have 1GB of on-board memory and play back MP3, WMA, and OGG. I really have no problems with this thing. It’s almost perfect: small, compact, colorful, and probably cheap. Unfortunately the 1GB limit might turn off music fans.


The S3 follows in the P2′s footsteps and also comes in multiple colors (who doesn’t like colors?). It has a 4 or 8GB of memory, FM tuner, and games and a sexy touch surface with LED backlights. Both players will be available in June.

If I had my druthers, I’d recommend the Pebble. It’s quite classy. I liked the P2 when it came out and the S3 is nice but the Pebble is just stunning.

And Hewlett Packard joins a long line of competitors offering unlimited online storage with its new Upline service. It costs $5 per month for one user, $7 per month for a family of three, or $9 per month for three business licenses (expandable to 100).

It only works on PCs and doesn’t handle file versioning, virtual drive or right-click integration, and it won’t back up any files that are open. It does offer password-protected file sharing, automatic watch folder/file-type backup every 15 minutes, and access to your files wherever you have an internet connection.

I don’t really see this taking off any more than every other online backup service out there. For my money, I prefer Amazon’s S3 service and Jungle Disk. It basically sees your Amazon S3 bucket as a drive on your computer, making it really easy to just drag files to it or save things directly to it.

Plus, you only pay for what you use. It’s a little tedious to set up, so these offerings like HP’s Upline service do have their place for less-savvy users who need automatic file backup and are diligent enough to keep everything in the correct watch-folders.

via TechCrunch

This video showing off the Samsung YP-S3 has started floating around the Internet, and we’re not not above embedding it here. The brief introduction to the diminutive portable media player tells us a few things. For one, and most troubling to me, personally, is the inclusion of touch-sensitive buttons. Real buttons make better buttons (unless it’s haptic, then never mind this complaint). Other than that, it seems fairly standard, with a 1.8-inch screen and capacities of 2GB, 4GB and 8GB. Dapreview points out that it’s essentially a smaller T10, which is essentially an updated K3.

And if you understood that last sentence, you may need to get out more.

Samsung shows off the YP-S3 [Dapreview]

A Tech Digest Production

If you’re in Korea, you’ll soon be able to pick up ACELAB’s new S3 portable media player which, according to a company official, is surrounded by a special finish that’s supposed to “enhance the clarity of the LCD for better viewing experience.”

Clarity-enhancement aside, you’ll get a built-in speaker, FM radio, voice recording, an image viewer, FM transmitter, video playback, and “up to 4GB of memory capacity is possible with micro SD memory slot,” whatever that means. Does it come with storage or do you BYO memory card? Who knows? Buy one and find out — it’ll be a fun surprise! Battery life is rated at 15 hours for music, 4 for video.

ACELABS to launch new premium mp3p ‘S3′ featuring 2.8-inch LCD [AVING]

Earth Day has come and gone, but that doesn’t mean we should go back to our Earth-killing habits. Many desktop PC owners blatantly overlook the low power settings on PCs that still allow functionality of network drives and/or remote applications while in Standby state. Maybe, it is a blatant disregard, but with a little guidance you can do some good for the Earth and, possibly, save a few bucks.

eXoid does a good job with a step-by-step walkthrough, but you may wonder why anyone would need to bother doing this, right? eXoid’s calculations estimate an extra $34.56 you could be paying based on your computer power settings. That adds up over time as your computer becomes bogged down and more power hungry.

Well, todays computers with dual video cards, RAID 0 Configurations, and multiple core processors can eat up a lot of juice. High end power supply units are now rated at over 1000 watts. If we take just a reasonable estimate that a computer uses 400 Watts idling along, we can find some astounding figures.
• I calculated (24 hours per day) * 30 days a month = 720 hours
• Power bills are generally measured in kilowatt hours or “kW/h”s. Power rates might be as much as $0.12 per kW/h
• Our total cost of having the computer on 24/7 for the month in this scenario would be as follows:
• .4 kW (400watts) * 720 Hours * $0.12kW/h = $34.56

Most new computers are already configured to enter S3 Standby mode, but it never hurts to check and make sure. Put the computer into Standby mode and listen for the fans. If they’re still spinning then your computer isn’t properly configured for S3. Let’s get crackin’ and put that power sucker into S3 Standby mode…it’s loads of fun!

• Check your BIOS settings: Make sure your BIOS Power Management settings are set to S3 standby. Unfortunately if it is not set to S3 when windows was installed, Windows will not install the correct settings to allow the computer to sleep in S3 mode. However, just changing the option in the BIOS will override the windows setting on some computers and you may enter the S3 sleep state anyways.
• Are you using a USB keyboard or mouse? This may be holding you back. For fear of allowing a computer to enter a sleep state that it was incapable of resuming from due to incompatible USB devices, Microsoft decided that if USB input devices were present, it would not allow S3 Standby mode. Fortunately this is easily bypassed through use of a registry entry. Just open regedit and enter the following registry entry as described in this Microsoft Knowledgebase Article:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesusb
“USBBIOSx”=DWORD:00000000

Entering this registry key, then rebooting should allow you to enter the S3 sleep state even while using USB peripherals in Windows XP.
• If your computer enters Standby mode, but then immediately starts back up, your USB devices may be giving you problems, check your computer’s BIOS settings and disable (or enable) USB power on options, changing these settings can allow your computer to function properly.

So far so good, right? Good! Now that you’ve configured your computer to properly enter S3 Standby mode let’s figure out how to use it when you need your computer to be ALWAYS ON if you use your computer as a file server, remote access point or as a VNC host. eXoid notes that the best way to do this is to set a static IP on your local network and here’s how to do it.

1. Navigate to the Control Panel: Doubleclick on Network Connections
2. Right click your Local Area Network: Choose Properties
3. Select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)

4. Click Properties.
5. Set your IP address manually: (ip address generally can be whatever you want it to be within certain limits, the subnet mask, default gateway, and DNS settings should correspond to your particular router. Check your router manual for more information)

6. Once you have made your changes, click ok and allow your network adapter to reconfigure itself and reconnect to the network.
7. Test your network to see if you still have connectivity by pulling up a browser or checking network accessibility.

We’re in the homestretch now, folks. Here’s how to wake up that PC when there’s traffic on the static IP.

1. Boot into your BIOS, make sure all WOL and network wake up options are enabled. Refer to your manufactuer’s motherboard manual.
2. Boot back into Windows: Navigate to the control panel: Doubleclick on Network Connections
3. Right click your Local Area Network: Choose Properties
4. In the first box it should show your network adapter. Click ‘Configure’
5. Navigate to the ‘advanced’ tab: Select ‘Wake Up Capabilities’

6. Every network device varies a bit, you want to enable all capabilities, choose ‘both’ or ‘magic packet and wake on pattern’
7. Click the Power Management Tab: check the box that states: “Allow this device to bring the computer out of standby”

Once you have selected these options and rebooted, you should now have set your computer up with a very powerful configuration. You can now allow your computer to go into standby mode, yet whenever your network adapter senses any activity on your specific Local ip (in my case: 192.168.0.200) it will quickly resume from S3 standby and perform the functions requested. As soon as the network is not being utilized, your computer will return to standby after the allotted time you have set in your power options settings.

If you’re not sure how to map network drives on an S3 enabled PC then just follow the link and eXoid is happy to help out with that, as well.

Going Green: Utilizing S3 Standby Mode Without Losing Functionality [eXoid]

Income from S3 is little more than a rounding error for Amazon, with nearly $11 billion in 2006 revenue. But the service has some passionate users who are claiming to be saving a lot of money versus handling storage themselves. It’s not too early to say, as Dan does, that “Infrastructure as a service has arrived.”

Amazon does need to be careful on the expense side, however. A BusinessWeek article late last year got deep into the numbers:

Most worrisome to investors is Amazon’s three-year-plus binge on new technologies. So far this year its spending on technology and content, including hiring hundreds of engineers and programmers to produce all these new services and buy more servers to run them, is up 52%, to $485 million. As a result, operating margins, at 4.1% for the past four quarters, now come in at less than Wal-Mart’s 5.9%. Even Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS), that doughty bricks-and-mortar book chain that many expected to get remaindered by the Web, has higher margins, at 5.4%. “I have yet to see how these investments are producing any profit,” gripes Piper Jaffray & Co. analyst Safa Rashtchy. “They’re probably more of a distraction than anything else.”

See our related coverage of other Amazon web services – EC2 and Mechanical Turk. I also had a podcast discussion with Jeff Bezos last November about Amazon’s web services unit. Listen to the interview at TalkCrunch.

Use cases range from large to small. Microsoft is using it to serve up its MSDN Direct Student Download to students around the world. Photosharing service Smugmug says it’s saved $500,000 by using S3 for its database that adds 10 terabytes of images each month. There are a number of start-ups leveraging S3 as their back-end for unique front-end storage apps. Other companies highlighted as using S3 include Altexa, ElephantDrive, Jungle Disk and MediaSilo.

We profiled S3 when it launched and said it could be a game changer. That potential appears to be beginning to bear fruit. We’ve covered a number of other online storage options here as well.

You’re probably familiar with the argument that Net Neutrality is essential for innovation because small start ups must have access to affordable data transfer infrastructure. The same is true for storage – S3 has the potential to facilitate loads of innovation by commoditizing what was in the past a substantial resource drain for data intensive services. This is only the beginning and I’ll be excited to see more companies or features appear for which data storage is a solved problem.

As I wrote previously, S3 provides a terrific opportunity for startups with great ideas for a storage user interface to avoid building a back end storage infrastructure. Amazon is offering extremely low pricing and a very dependable infrastructure. For some people, S3 will allow them to launch a service that they otherwise couldn’t have built.

Nik Cubrilovic, the CEO of startup Omnidrive, was co-host of the show (as was Keith Teare) and we tried to convince him, unsuccesfully, to switch to S3 for the back-end of his storage.

Talkcrunch continues to do well after its first three shows. It is currently included in the iTunes “new and notable” section and is on of the top 20 technology podcasts (as of right now it is #12).

I was able to speak with Adam Selipsky (Amazon Web Services VP of Product Management and Developer Relations), Dave Barth (Product Manager for Amazon S3) and Andrew Herdener (Senior Public Relations Manager for Amazon) today about the service.

They’ve built the back end for the number one requested company that I wrote about late last year – reliable and cheap online storage. I’ve been watching this space very closely, even profiling a number of new entrants, and I have to say that S3 changes the game entirely. Move over Google Drive, Amazon just stole your thunder (for now).

Until now, a sophisticated and scalable data storage infrastructure like Amazon’s has been beyond the reach of small developers. Amazon S3 enables any developer to leverage Amazon’s own benefits of massive scale with no up-front investment or performance compromises. Developers are now free to innovate knowing that no matter how successful their businesses become, it will be inexpensive and simple to ensure their data is quickly accessible, always available, and secure.

Here are the facts: This is a web service, and so Amazon is not releasing a customer facing service. They are offering standards-based REST and SOAP web services interfaces for developers. Entire classes of companies can be built on S3 that would not have been possible before due to infrastructure costs for the developer.

Virtually any file type is allowed, up to 5 GB. Files may be set as public, shared or private and will have a unique URL.

Pricing is cheaper than anything else I’ve seen: $0.15 per GB of storage per month, and $0.20 for each GB of data transferred up or downstream. This translates to $15 per month for 100 GB of storage, net of any transfer fees (to move that much data on to S3 would be a one time cost of $20). These prices are going to be significantly below the development and ongoing costs for small or medium sized storage projects – meaning a lot of the front end services I’ve previously profiled will be much better off moving their entire back end to S3.

This is game changing.

See Rob Hof at Business Week for his thoughts on S3 as well. He says “it should put to rest the notion, still popular among a few analysts, that Amazon is just a retailer.”