As CES 2012 begins, Acer announced its new range of ultra thin notebooks which it claims to be world’s thinnest notebook. Acer’s chief executive JT Wang announced Aspire S5 notebook along with the news that four more series of this product will be launched at second quarter of this year with Windows 8 OS in them.

Aspire S5 has 13.3 inch screen and weighs less than 1.35 Kg. It has instant-on capability (1.5 seconds), weeks of battery life in sleep mode, Intel iCore processor chip, slim DVD drive and a total of 8 hours of battery life.

Acer's Aspire S5

Acer is trying to push this as a new product into a market. However, considering the technical specifications of Aspire S5, it looks like it is a direct competition for Apple MacBook Air.

Industry analysts note that its going to be difficult for Acer to push this new product because one, the ultra thin notebook market is getting crowded with Toshiba and Samsung likely to launch its own thin notebooks. Two, this marked dominated by Apple, which set the standard for ultra thin notebooks, is going to be tough to beat. Third, tablets have started to make notebooks outdated. With newer, faster and better tablets coming out, its going to be difficult for any laptop manufacturer to convince users that ultra thin notebook is the way to go.

Another of Acer’s announcement, which has generated a lot of buzz, is AcerCloud service, but for the wrong reasons. Since its announcement in CES 2012 by chief executive JT Wang, many bloggers and media have described the service offering, where users can share photos, music and video online, as blatant ripoff of Apple’s iCloud service.

AcerCloud service

Steve Kovach of Business Insider notes that even the terms of service is very similar to Apple’s own offering.

Acer hopes that its new cloud service will catch in the Windows/PC world. It hopes that users with smartphones with both Windows and Andriod OS in them will use Acer’s AcerCloud service to upload photos and share music online. However, with competition from Google alone in Windows world, is going to be an uphill battle, which it seems to be doomed at this point.

It will be interesting to see how Acer’s new service and its new line of notebooks fair in the following months to come.

If you have the option to go for AcerCloud service, will you give it a try? Would you also go for this ultra thin notebooks instead of a tablet if given the option? Share your thoughts in our comments section.