The new MacBook Air is the thinnest laptop yet, but as Apple got us used with quality is also very sturdy. Still, it’s not the ultimate ultra-portable laptop, but it’s very good at it and has great performances for it’s extreme sizes. Being only 0.76 inches think in it’s thickest part, it’s even better than the standard 13-inch MacBook on some parts, but sure, it lacks some important features.

It definitely isn’t very good for connectivity, featuring only one USB port and no Ethernet, mobile broadband, FireWire, optical drive, media-card reader or memory card slot. So we can say it’s mostly build for internet use, if WiFi available, missing other connectivity option. But still don’t get too pessimistic, as you can wirelessly attach an optical drive to it, even if this doesn’t count on portability.

So if you need an extremely low weight, big display laptop, this definitely is your number one option. And most probably, if you need that, you use WiFi often, in hot spots, while traveling. Because, of course, you don’t want the lightest laptop to keep on your desk.

It’s chassis is built of aluminum, being fingerprint resistant and weighting only 3 pounds. Also, the aluminum makes it solid, so you don’t have to worry about it breaking by any small mistake.

The 13.3-inch LED-backlit TFT display sports an ambient light sensor, that adjusts it’s brightness in order to save battery life, depending on the light in the room. The same technology is also used in the backlit full size keyboard. Of course an ultra-portable couldn’t lack a camera, iSight in this case and a microphone.

It’s trackpad is almost 5-inches diagonally and features Apple’s new multi-touch gestures, which allows you to use three fingers while navigating the internet, viewing documents or photos. The technology is almost like iPhone’s and is very useful.

As we’ve already said, it lacks an optical drive, but it comes with a software that lets you remotely use other PC’s or Mac’s one. It works with no problem, but doesn’t allow you to remotely burn movies and music on CD or DVD. Also, a USB DVD burner called the MacBook Air Superdrive is available from Apple for $99.

While some of the laptops are full with totally unusual ports, this one doesn’t even sport the mostly used ones, unfortunately. We’ve already listed the ones missing, but there’s an option for some of them. There’s an option for an USB-to-Ethernet adapter, priced at $29 and also there are two included dongles, one for DVI and one for VGA video outputs.

The MacBook Air definitely isn’t designed for storage, so it only have two options, a 80GB HDD or a 64GB SSD and the last one seems to be the better option both for reliability and power consumption. Unfortunately, it will cost you $999 to choose the SSD. It’s base price is $1,799 and it features a Intel Core 2 Duo 1.6Ghz CPU, upgradeable to a 1.8Ghz one for $300. So if you add the SSD and 1.8Ghz CPU, it will go from $1,799 to $3,098, which isn’t very pleasant. As performances, it’s not quite the fastest laptop, with a 4,200rpm HDD or 1.6Ghz CPU, but at least it sports 2GB of RAM.

It would be a wonderful and useful ultra-portable, if it had a few more ports and especially a user-replaceable battery. When you travel, you rarely have access to a plug, so the only option was to have more batteries, but only if you could change them. It’s battery lifetime of 5 hours isn’t very low, but sometimes not enough.