The ASUS Zenbook's aluminum body is sleek, shiny and polished.
It is a gorgeous piece of hardware, but it also gives you this nagging feeling that you have seen it all before.
That's probably because it is a virtual lookalike of the Apple MacBook Air.
It even weighs about the same as a MacBook Air, at 1.3kg for the 13 inch UX31.
This is not a bad thing.
The MacBook Air is widely recognised as being one of the slimmest, lightest and best-looking laptops around, and now users who prefer a Windows laptop but like the aesthetics of the MacBook Air can pick up a Zenbook to satisfy their needs.
And there is more.
The Zenbook surpasses the MacBook Air with its high-resolution 1600x900 13.3-inch display, compared to the MacBook Air's 1440x900 screen.
On board as well are quality Bang and Olufsen ICEpower speakers, but the review unit's speakers unfortunately sounded slightly scratchy when the volume was cranked up.
The Zenbook also comes with useful widgets that will predict how much battery life remains based on whether the user is watching a movie, doing office work or playing games on the laptop, and automatically save all user files once the battery's power level gets too low.
Unfortunately, the Zenbook has some glaring flaws that prevent it from being a serious rival to Apple's MacBook Air.
Those who have issues with Mac keyboards will be more forgiving on using the clunky un-backlit ASUS keyboard.
Get ready to punch the keys or learn to live with constantly mistyped words.
The effort taken to enter longer search terms into Google proved to be highly frustrating, compounded by the Zenbook's wobbly touchpad that made highlighting the mistyped words to correct them, even more frustrating.
As if with a mind of its own, the Zenbook's cursor would unexpectedly zip away even when care is taken to deliberately guide it to a mistyped word with the touchpad.
Yes, there are accuracy issues, with even software fixes unable to improve on the habits of the wayward touchpad.
In addition, the touchpad's finger swiping shortcuts to scroll windows and navigate web pages were simply not practical and badly implemented.
Sometimes the swipes registered, sometimes they did not.
This reduces the finger swiping shortcuts to being more of a novelty than a reliable time-saving tool.
No doubt, users need to be in a Zen-like frame of mind to look past the flaws of the Zenbook.
But then again, the fact remains that the device dubbed an "Ultrabook" by Asus, represents quite good value for money, coming in at S$1,398 for the 11 inch with 128 GB SSD.
The solid state hard drive gives the Zenbook just that little edge over the 11 inch MacBook air, as does its speedy Intel Core i7 processor under the hood of its slim, tapered profile, the silvery body.
The ASUS also has reasonable connectivity in the form of a USB 3.0 port, a USB 2.0 port, a built-in card reader, a mini-HDMI output port as well as a VGA output port, with an Ethernet attachment and VGA output adapter.
Its five to seven-hour Ibm thinkpad t60 battery life (depending on what you do with the laptop) is adequate as well, and will see most users through a standard work day on a single charge.
The charger is quite light too, so it is not a big hassle to pack it along when extended use is required.
All these factors combine to make Zenbook ideal for those looking for an aesthetically pleasing device which boasts decent performance and a reasonable price tag. But a MacBook Air killer it is not.
Tagcloud: Technology Features , ASUS Zenbook's Laptop , battery life , dell pc764 battery , hp pavilion dv7 battery
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