Review: ASUS Zenbook UX31

The Zenbook is an ultrabook alright. However, despite its sleek finish, heavy duty performance and super quick sleep and resume capabilities, will it succeed in justifying the hefty price tag it has on its bumper?

The Asus Zenbook UX31 was one of the first ultrabooks to hit the market in late 2011. Four months later, there's plenty of competition in the thin and light laptop space, but the UX31 is still one of the most impressive specimens of the ultrabook species. It's thin, light and attractive. It boots quickly and resumes from sleep almost instantaeneously. And the Asus Zenbook UX31 has something that's difficult to find on other 13.3 inch notebooks: a high resolution, 1600 x 900 pixel display.

But the Zenbook UX31 isn't necessarily right for everyone. It has just two USB ports, lacks full-sized VGA and HDMI ports, and has a rather high starting price of around ₹89,999.

The model featured in this review is an Asus Zenbook UX31 with an Intel Core i5-2557M dual-core processor, Intel HD 3000 graphics, 4GB of DDR3 1333 MHz RAM, and a 128GB solid state disk.

Design

By definition, all ultrabooks are thin and light laptops. Intel coined the word to represent notebooks that measure less than 0.8 inches thick, weigh less than 4 pounds, feature either a solid state disk or a hard dive with fast solid state cache, and the latest Intel processors.

The Zenbook UX31 passes all those tests with flying colors. It measures 12.8″ x 8.8″ x 0.7″ at its thickest point, and just 0.1″ thick at its thinnest, since the computer has a sort of wedge-shaped design where the front is thinner than the back. Sure, the 0.1 inch point at the front feels a little like an aesthetic gimmick, but it still makes the laptop look even thinner than it is.

The ultrabook weighs in at just 1.3kgs, making the 13.3 inch laptop lighter than some 10.1 inch netbooks.

It's not just the laptop that's small. Asus also designed the power adapter with portability in mind. Instead of the typical clunky power brick you get with most laptops, the UX31 power adapter is barely any larger than one you would expect to use for a smartphone.

While the laptop gets reasonably good battery life, it's not that big a deal to grab the power cable and throw it in your bag if you think you might need to charge the UX31 on the go.

Asus designed the UX31 with a sturdy aluminum case that looks good and feels sturdy. There's a dark brushed aluminum circular pattern on the lid, and the palm rest and keyboard area also has a brushed metal feel.

On the bottom of the laptop you'll find a series of cooling vents. The fans tend to kick in when you're performing CPU-intensive tasks, and they can cause the computer to sound a little noisy at times. But unless you're in a pretty quiet room you probably won't notice them most of the time.

The bottom of the ultrabook also gets a little warm to the touch after it's been running for a little while.

Speaking of the bottom of the laptop — there are no access panels. You can't easily remove the 50Whr battery or replace the RAM or solid state disk. There are a series of screws which you can remove if you really want to get at the insides, but you'll probably void your warranty by doing so.

In other words, the Zenbook'sunibody design is attractive and helps keep the machine thin and light. But it makes upgrading the ultrabook difficult.

On the left side of the computer there's a USB 2.0 port, a combo mic/headphone jack, and an SDHC card slot.

The right side features a USB 3.0 port, power jack, a mini-port for a VGA adapter, and a micro HDMI Port.

All told you get just 2 USB ports — which don't seem like a problem until you realize that there's no Ethernet port. Instead Asus ships the UX31 with a USB-to-Ethernet adapter. So if you're trying to connect to a wired network you'll need to use one port for that adapter. If you prefer a mouse to the touchpad, there goes the other USB port — and that doesn't leave any free ports for USB flash drives or other peripherals.

Full-sized Ethernet, VGA, and HDMI ports would be nice, but it would clearly be difficult to fit them into the slim case. And to be honest, there's not much need to plug in an external display, and when was the last time you needed to use an Ethernet cable?

Asus includes a slim case with the UX31 which is just big enough to hold the laptop and nothing else. While it's not exactly a manila envelope, it's almost as thin — and protects the computer while highlighting just how thin it is.

While netbooks and some other low-cost ultraportable laptops are designed as secondary computers, ultrabooks are designed so that they really can be used as primary computers. They have decent screen resolutions, fast processors, and most of the features you'd expect from a modern laptop — except for replaceable batteries.

The Asus Zenbook UX31 also has a 1600 x 900 pixel glossy display, which means that unless you really need to plug in a 1920 x 1080 monitor or want a dual-display setup, you probably won't need to use an adapter very often anyway.

Windows 7 doesn't do a great job of handling high resolutions on small screens — so some users may find text or images to be too small. You can adjust the Windows DPI settings to increase some system fonts, but this is only a partial fix.

Hopefully Windows 8 will do a better job with high pixel densities. Mobile operating systems such as iOS and Android have already shown that devices with high pixel densities can look pretty darn good when the software is well designed.

While the display resolution is excellent the viewing angles for the display are about average. If you tilt back the screen or view it from the sides, colors will start to wash out. This isn't a big problem if you're sitting directly in front of the PC, but if you want to share photos or videos with someone sitting next to you, they may not look as good in their eyes as yours.

The keyboard features an island or chiclet-style layout with flat keys and small gaps between each key. For the first few days I used the laptop I found myself making fairly frequent typos due to missed keys or keys that hadn't been pressed as hard as I thought.

I feel like the keys might be a little more spread out than on other keyboards I've tried. I had been typing on the keyboard for almost a month and I still couldn't get used to the keyboard. I wouldn't mind slightly smaller keys if it meant that Asus could fit a row of dedicated keys for PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End functions on the right side of the keyboard.

The company's older UL20A laptop with a 12.1 inch screen makes room for those keys, but the larger UX31 does not. Instead you have to hold the Fn key while pressing the arrow keys to access those functions.

It's also worth noting that the Zenbook UX31 does not have a backlit keyboard. That's not normally something I would point out, but it's a feature that's found in some cheaper ultrabooks such as the HP Folio 13.

Below the keyboard you'll find a large touchpad. There are no buttons below the touchpad. Instead you can press down anywhere on the surface for a left-click, or press the lower right corner for a right-click.

I'm not a huge fan of touchpads with integrated click areas, and find that I have to push a little harder than I'd like in order to click. But for the most part the touchpad works reasonably well when I'm using the ultrabook on my lap. When I'm using it at a desk or table I typically prefer to plug in a mouse. I'm old fashioned that way.

Performance

If you're looking for a replacement for a laptop you bought more than a year or two ago, the UX31 will probably be a faster, more capable machine. It fares reasonably well on benchmarks, handles HD video playback with ease, has no problems multitasking, and gets decent battery life to boot.

Speaking of booting, one of the most impressive tricks the UX31 has up its sleeve is its quick boot, shutdown, and resume from sleep speeds. In general if you close the lid the laptop will go to sleep in just a few seconds. But while most Windows 7 laptops take 10 or 15 seconds or longer to resume from sleep, the UX31 wakes up almost as soon as you open the lid, letting you pick up where you left off in 3 seconds or less.

If you completely shut down the laptop it takes just 25 seconds or less to go from off to on. And by on, I mean you have a fully usable Windows desktop, and the computer is already connected to your WiFi network.

The fast boot and resume speeds come from the fast procssor, the fast 128GB SATA III solid state disk, and software tweaks from Asus and Intel.

Another nifty feature that Intel is baking into the ultrabook platform is a smart connect technology that allows ultrabooks to connect to the internet periodically even when they're sleeping. That means if you close the lid on your ultrabook while your browser is open to Gmail or Google Reader, for instance, the latest email messages or news articles will be ready for you when you open your laptop again.

This isn't quite the same thing as ARM-based smartphones or tablets which enter low power mode while the screen is off but still receive push notifications. Ultrabooks like the UX31 only go online periodically, so your information might not be quite as up to date. But it's still a pretty nice value-added feature.

You should be able to play older video games or games that don't require bleeding edge graphics on the Asus Zenbook UX31. But it's not a gaming machine, and I don't think you'll find an ultrabook that really is one anytime soon.

Battery Life

Since the UX31 doesn't have a user replaceable battery it's a good thing that it gets reasonably good battery life. I found I could regularly get between 5 and 6 hours of run time while surfing the web, listening to music, and performing other light-weight tasks.

Watching video or performing CPU-intensive tasks (such as, for example, running benchmarks or transcoding video) will reduce the battery life.

Like most other Asus notebooks the Zenbook UX31 has a version of the Asus Hybrid Engine which gives you four different performance modes to choose from: High Performance, Quiet Office, Battery Saving, and Entertainment Mode.

You can toggle between these modes by hitting the Fn key and space bar. For most day to day tasks, the Battery Saving or Quiet Office modes will suffice.

Your battery life will probably vary depending on which mode you use. You can also fire up the Power4Gear Hybrid app to adjust settings such as CPU speed, screen brightness, and screen timeout.

Verdict

The ASUS Zenbook is a good laptop, but I don't think it can do any justice to its hefty price tag.

That's the problem I think ultrabooks face in the market today. Solid State disks don't come cheap. Intel Core processors don't come cheap. Thin but sturdy cases don't come cheap.

But all of those things feel like incremental upgrades. If you opt for a laptop with a 320GB hard drive you can save a lot of money and you might not notice that much of a performance difference. Get one with a slower processor and you'll still probably be able to do most of the things you want to do with a computer. And you'll save money.

Heck, you could even pick up a 13-inch Macbook Air for a cost lesser than that.