The bad: The keyboard and touch pad are disadvantages; there are equally thin laptops out there with much better battery life.
The bottom line: The Asus Zenbook UX31E is definitely an excellent-looking Windows Ultrabook laptop that matches the MacBook Air step for step by having an even better price. Fans of great audio, high-resolution screens and a lot of ports will be happy; keyboard/touch pad aficionados will end up being disappointed.
Review:
If imitation is the sincerest form associated with flattery, then the MacBook Air should be positively blushing correct around now. A sudden onslaught of Ultrabooks--the Intel-coined phrase for thin, MacBook Air-esque Windows laptops with fast trunk times and sleek, high-end designs--has hit just in time for that holidays, and one of the most highly hyped ones we've seen may be the Asus Zenbook, a product that doesn't shy away through an Apple-like design whatsoever. That's not such a poor thing: who doesn't want a thin, unibody metal lightweight laptop that starts fast and it has a great battery life?... Expand full review
If imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, then the MacBook Air ought to be positively blushing right around now. A sudden onslaught associated with Ultrabooks--the Intel-coined term for thin, MacBook Air-esque Windows laptop computers with fast boot times and sleek, high-end designs--has hit just over time for the holidays, and one of the most highly hyped ones we've seen may be the Asus Zenbook, a product that doesn't shy away through an Apple-like design whatsoever. That's not such a poor thing: who doesn't want a thin, unibody metal lightweight laptop that starts fast and it has a great battery life?
The 13-inch Asus Zenbook, despite looking at least as expensive and high-end as laptops like the Samsung Series 9, has a starting price of $1, 099, which include 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD drive. That's $200 more affordable than the equivalent MacBook Air. Smartly, the Zenbook will get that part right: when competing with a product as singularly well-known and highly regarded as the MacBook Air, your product has to end up being either better or cheaper.
Cheaper, it is: as with regard to better, I'd have to disagree. Excellent speakers, sleek style, and a high-resolution screen are accompanied by a finicky computer keyboard and touch pad, giving the ever-so-slightly-off sensation when focusing on the Zenbook. It feels like the opposite of the silky-smooth experience on the MacBook Air. Battery life is short of the Air's high numbers, too. Nearly 5 hours isn't shabby, but it isn't industry-leading.
Those are somewhat minor issues for what's otherwise an extremely solid and impressive thin laptop, but at a cost north of $1, 000, these are issues anyone would focus on. The 13-inch Zenbook UX31 gets more expensive in 256GB SSD as well as Core i7 configurations, climbing up to $1, 449 from its highest price. If I were buying a Zenbook, I'd stay with our $1, 099 review model and live with the actual limitations, glad that I had a MacBook Air-alike that saved me a few dollars on the way. If your idea of an Ultrabook is a Windows version of the MacBook Air with a slightly lower price, then think about the Zenbook your product: just be forewarned that the computer keyboard, touch pad, and battery life are less impressive than the audio/visual features.
Take the Asus Zenbook out of its foam-lined jewel-box product packaging, and you might think you'd accidentally bought a MacBook Atmosphere. The experience is that similar, down to the square plastic wall charger having a removable plug tip. The Zenbook, made of unibody aluminum such as the MacBook Air, has a darker gloss to its back lid and a heft that means it is almost feel more like magnesium or steel. Radial metal lines about the back catch light and give the Zenbook an industrial-design taste. Inside, the metal surfaces are brushed in a delicate vertical pattern. Brushed metal on the bottom is only interrupted with a rear speaker grill and four black rubber feet.
The bladelike teardrop form of the Zenbook is even curved like a MacBook Atmosphere, but it's slightly more bulbous: its 0. 71 in . of maximum thickness is cleverly concealed, but I could tell the difference after i slipped it into a messenger bag. A weight associated with 3. 1 pounds is still light, but it's a tad heavier compared to MacBook Air, Acer S3, and Lenovo IdeaPad U300s.
Ports line the sides from the Zenbook UX31, just like on the MacBook Air. HARDWARE, an SD card slot, and a headphone jack collection the left side, while a USB 3. 0 interface, Mini DisplayPort, and Micro-HDMI port line the right. There's no Ethernet jack, but Asus includes a USB-to-Ethernet and VGA dongle using the Zenbook, along with an attractive brown, nylon mailer-envelope-style sleeve to safeguard your laptop investment.
The Zenbook's got a great coffee-shop quotient: it's not hard to slip into and out of a bag, and it’s likely that you'll draw a fair amount of casual attention from nearby latte-sippers when utilizing it. I found that fellow office-workers were more eager to take a look than the typical laptop. Asus spent a lot of effort about the Zenbook's design, and it shows.
The magnetic hinge that keeps the Zenbook closed works somewhat just like a MacBook Air's, but the narrow lip is harder to catch together with your fingers and pull apart. Sometimes it worked perfectly, other times I'd to fiddle a bit. Once it opens, the interior's clean and crisp design provides an unencumbered keyboard seated up near the screen and an extremely large--about as large as a MacBook Air's--multitouch click mat, with dedicated click zones underneath delineated with a easy little black dividing line.
Alas, if only that keyboard and touch pad could come near to what a MacBook provides. The flat, square raised secrets are too shallow and mushy for my taste, but it's a lot more than that: I mistyped quite a bit when keys didn't appear to register. The keyboard's top row of function keys will double duty for volume control and screen brightness, and also the power button's part of this same row on the actual far right. All buttons required me to simultaneously press Fn to raise/lower volume and so on, which killed some of the elegance. The keyboard additionally lacks backlighting, and the black-on-silver key lettering can be hard to see at off angles.
The touch pad isn't the more prevalent Synaptics version, but a Sentelic that, while offering comparable two- and three-finger gesture controls, wasn't as responsive consistently--even whenever we installed the latest driver updates. Neither the keyboard nor the touch pad is really a deal breaker, but they mar the supposed Zen-like really feel I felt that Asus hopes we achieve via the actual Zenbook. Love at first sight didn't describe my ergonomic desk experience.
Asus includes some software tools on the Zenbook which should feel familiar to owners of other Asus computers. Lifeframe, Asus' Web cam program, is as chock-full of odd backgrounds and additional features as always. Instant On is a desktop golf widget that promises faster wake-up from sleep. I activated this (who wouldn't? ) and found a cold powered-off boot-up to consider around 16 seconds, but wake-up from sleep by raising the lid was indeed snappy, coming in right round the promised 2-second mark. A clever battery life widget shows not just the estimated hours left of use, but estimated hours for action, "office operation, " video playback, and Internet browsing. Asus promises fourteen days of standby time when in sleep mode, but I wasn't in a position to test this in the limited time I've spent using the laptop. A data-save feature will save the laptop's data once the battery dips below 5 percent, much like Apple's MacBooks already do very well.
Asus touts the audio about the Zenbook, and it lives up to the billing. I loved hearing music and movies via the Bang & Olufson-designed loudspeakers, situated under the laptop. Their resonance and quality had been a step above other thin laptops I've used. They're not the very best laptop speakers I've ever experienced, but for the dimension, they might be.
The included Webcam's a letdown: I booted up Lifeframe and learned that the camera had a 640x480-pixel maximum resolution. That's no much better than a budget laptop, and doesn't fit the sticker cost.
Despite being so small, the Zenbook UX31E-DH52 manages to incorporate all the ports I'd expect on a larger laptop computer, including USB 3. 0 and HDMI. Some of the actual ports are limited in number (only 1 USB two. 0 and 1 USB 3. 0) or size (Micro-HDMI, small VGA), but dongles for VGA and Ethernet make up for what's missing much better than Apple's MacBook Air or the Samsung Series 9 perform. I wish this had a standard HDMI port--I detest using dongles. Of course the optical drive's intentionally omitted, as it is across all Ultrabooks.
The 13-inch Zenbook UX31 (there's additionally an 11-inch model, the UX21) comes in three settings varieties, starting at $1, 099 for the UX31E-DH52 this particular review unit: a Core i5 processor, 4GB of MEMORY, and 128GB SSD storage. That's $200 less than the same 13-inch MacBook Air, or $100 less than a equivalent Lenovo IdeaPad U300s. The 256GB SSD configuration bumps the cost to $1, 349, and upgrading to a Core i7 CPU brings the cost to $1, 449. Still, even at that lofty cost, it beats the top-end MacBook Air by $100 and will be offering a better processor, and gives more bang for the buck compared to Lenovo IdeaPad U300s. You can't argue that the Asus Zenbook is not a relative value.
A 1. 7 GHz Core i5-2557M processor chip is technically a low-voltage CPU, but it's the same generation of processor that's in laptops such as the Lenovo IdeaPad U300s, Acer Aspire S3, and Apple MacBook Atmosphere. In performance tests, the entry-level Zenbook managed to outperform both Acer Aspire S3 and Lenovo IdeaPad U300s in common, even though the gains were sometimes slight. Experientially, I discovered it was an excellent experience for all-around computing. Unless of course you're doing heavy video editing, graphics work, or video gaming, you won't notice the processing compromise. Multitasking and movie streaming in HD were all excellent, as would be anticipated.
With the included Intel integrated graphics, I didn't expect this technique to be used for much gaming, and neither in the event you, if by gaming you're thinking of Call of Responsibility. With the higher-resolution 1, 600x900-pixel screen, you should expect basic casual games and mainstream gaming with settings rejected, but not much more.
Asus offers a two-year warranty on parts and labor and something year of accidental damage protection with the Zenbook UX31E-DH52, which easily bests the minimal warranty service about the average consumer laptop. Asus' Web site can get just a little confusing to navigate, but 24/7 phone support is additionally available.
Windows owners hoping for their own MacBook Air get closer than ever before with the Asus Zenbook UX31E-DH2, with the added advantage of a greater variety of ports and a lower cost. The Zenbook is less expensive on a pure processor/spec comparison compared to MacBook Air. The Zenbook's underwhelming keyboard, battery life, and webcam might be turn-offs for some, while the higher-resolution screen and high-quality onboard speakers might seal the offer for others.
Asus UX31E-DH52
Windows 7 House Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 1. 7GHz Intel Core i5-2557M; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1, 333MHz; 64MB(Dedicated) Intel GMA HIGH DEFINITION; 128GB Solid State Drive
Toshiba Portege R835-P56X
Windows 7 House Premium (64-bit); 2. 3GHz Intel Core i5-2410M; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1, 333MHz; 64MB (Dedicated)/1696MB (Total) Intel GMA HIGH DEFINITION; 640GB Hitachi 5, 400rpm
Lenovo IdeaPad U300s
Windows 7 House Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 1. 8GHz Intel Core i7-2677M; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1, 333MHz; 64MB (Shared) Intel HIGH DEFINITION 3000; 256GB JMicron 616 Solid State Drive
Acer Desire S3-951-6646
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 1. 6GHz Intel Primary i5-2467M; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1, 333MHz; 128MB (Shared) Intel HIGH DEFINITION 3000; 320GB Hitachi 5, 400rpm + 20GB Solid Condition Drive
Apple Macbook Air 13. 3-inch - Summer 2011
OPERATING SYSTEM X 10. 7 Lion; 1. 7GHz Intel Core i5-2557M; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1, 333MHz; 384MB (Shared) Intel HIGH DEFINITION 3000; 128GB Apple Solid State Drive
Dell XPS 14z
Home windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 2. 8GHz Intel Primary i7-2640M; 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1, 333MHz; 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 520M or 1GB(Dedicated) Intel GMA HD; 750GB Western Digital 7, 200rpm.
Source : CNET
