Hands-on with Acer Aspire S5 ultrabook, Iconia Tab

As the “thinnest ultrabook ever,” the 2.97-pound 13-inch S5 stands only 15 millimeters high when closed. The power button is located on the left-hand side and evokes a sleep button on a tablet or smartphone. The trackpad on the S5 seemed a little overactive to touch, interpreting tiny brushes as taps; we had to be a little more deliberate than usual about lowering our fingers toward it.

Acer’s reps told Ars that the A200 was running Android 3.2, nevertheless when we investigated the About page, the listed OS was Android version 4.0.1. Inside, the final model will have a dual-core Tegra 2 processor, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB or 16GB of storage expandable by microSD card. We found the tablet opened applications smoothly and was very responsive with the newer OS. Acer has added a small circle icon to the menu bar that, when tapped, brings up a wheel of favorite apps and items for easy access. This seems redundant with the availability of the home screen, which could hold a boodle of icons even with the giant clock and weather widget.

The A200’s ports are on its short ends

All of the A200’s ports are on its short ends: the headphone jack, microUSB, and USB are on one side, and power port on the other. Ports on tablets are often bad news for thinness, however even with USB, the A200 isn’t too thick. Those ports sit then and there to the sleep button, during a lock switch and volume rocker are on one of the long sides.

The company's new AcerCloud service uses an Acer computer as a hub to host files that users can access on devices like tablets and smartphones. Within the sharing apps on the smartphone and tablet, we could both stream and download music for playing offline. Acer plans to market the new S5 with the slogan “Always Connect;" this, it turns out, means the host computer must wake up in order to serve you whenever you access a song via AcerCloud on your device.

This will make all however the most desk-bound of notebooks an unreliable host for cloud services, and since Acer doesn’t make many desktops, this will be an inconvenient thing to think about when relying on AcerCloud. On the upside, unlike Apple's iCloud, you have as much storage space to work with as exists on your host computer.

The Iconia Tab A200 launches January 15 at $329 for the 8GB model, and $349 for the 16GB version. The tablet will run Android 3.2 at launch, nevertheless Acer is projecting an update to Android 4 for mid-February. The Aspire S5 has no projected price but, yet is set for a second-quarter launch this year.