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Asus UX31 Zenbook : The Asus Zenbook is sleek, powerfull utrabook and a truly stunning-looking piece of equipment. Price from:£999 |
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Reviews
Zenbook is the best looking laptop and looks like Apple's MacBook. he Asus UX31 is virtually exactly the same as the 11.6-inch UX21 Zenbook. The only major difference is obviously going to be the larger 13.3-inch display with higher 1600×900 resolution, SD card slot, larger battery for longer hours and slightly heavier body.
The Design
The Zenbook isn't overly heavy though, we slung it into a rucksack and carried it, barely noticing it was there. It's not as light as it could be, but it's still super-portable. The 13.3-inch unit does have plenty of detail though with a 1600 x 900 pixel resolution, which is good. Certainly for day-to-day web surfing and video watching, it is more than capable.
Cracking open the lid reveals a full aluminium palm rest and seamless construction.The chassis is small enough to carry around without too much trouble. With a width of only 325mm and a depth of 224mm, it'll happily slide into a small case without too much pushing and shoving. Weighing an incredibly light 1.3kg and only 17mm thick at its widest point, the Asus ZenBook UX31 is an amazingly compact laptop.
A tapered design means the thinnest edge is a miniscule 3mm, which matches the tiny dimensions of the 13in MacBook Air. The full-size QWERTY keyboard was excellent to type on, thanks to its isolated keys that were well spaced. Despite having very little travel, each key felt springy and responsive, so we could type at full speed right away.
Engine Room
ZenBook UX31 comes with some high performance hardware, including an ultra-low voltage version of Intel’s excellent Core i7 processor. The dual-core i7-2677M normally runs at 1.8GHz, but can Turbo Boost up to 2.9GHz when extra power is needed. Paired with 4GB of RAM and a super-fast 128GB SATA III SSD, it flew through our benchmarks with an overall score of 47.
Asus hasn’t been able to add a dedicated graphics card to the UX31 – instead, it uses the graphics chip integrated into Intel’s processor, which is easily powerful enough to play high definition video.
Connectivity
MacBook Air does not have many port which is one of the letdown however ZenBook pack an impressive set of connection options. There are two USB sockets, one of both 2.0 and 3.0 speeds. You'll also find mini HDMI and mini VGA sockets. You get a VGA adaptor in the box, but there's no supplied HDMI cable. In Addition there is also SD Card slot, headphone jack and a small power socket and sadly there is no Ethernet socket built in. That's true, but Asus includes a USB adaptor in the box to allow you to connect to a wired network. Apple does this too, but it costs £25, which is a bit steep.
The keyboard looks good, although the key travel is a little too shallow. With this laptop, that seemed to translate to a very poor success rate with typing. Often letters would go missing, and it would be because either the key isn't sensitive enough, or we hadn't quite hit it dead on. This is in stark contrast to the Apple MacBook Air, which doesn't have a lot of travel either, but still manages to be a nice typing experience - although it isn't perfect either
The trackpad isnt too good either, although many of the multi-touch gestures you'd get on the Mac are here. Three fingers swiped upward will give you the Windows Flip interface. Annoyingly, it doesn't then allow you to scroll through the windows. Two finger scrolling works okay, but it's not sensitive enough, and tweaking it doesn't help.
You could carry a small wireless keyboard and mouse around with you, but for a laptop, that's really not the point. Out in the field, where you don't sit at a desk, the digging in of the chassis is less likely to annoy, but you'll still have to contend with a sub-optimal keyboard and mouse combination.
Storage
Asus has shoved in a 128GB solid state drive, which is smaller and faster than traditional hard disk drives, helping the Zenbook to achieve a resume from sleep time of around two seconds.
Imagine
ZenBook does not seems to have a lot of contrast although it can be very bright and the viewing angle isnt bad. Video quality with a 1080p clip was very good indeed. Audio is mostly decent. The speaker system branded by Bang and Olufsen, though how much the audio firm did. Certainly, audio was clear at low- and mid-volume, but get too high and it distorted unpleasantly.
Battery Life
The battery life is very impressive with normal use - Ethernet, not Wi-Fi - you'd see 5 hours quite easily, Asus states it will give you 7 hours. This is impressive for a machine so small, and more than enough for most uses.
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