ASUS Zenbook UX31E-DH52 13.3-Inch Thin and Light Ultrabook (Silver Aluminum)

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Product Feature

• Intel Core i5 Processor 1.7GHz
• 4GB SO-DIMM RAM
• 128GB Hard Drive
• 13.3-Inch Screen, Intel UMA
• Windows 7 Home Premium, 7 hours Battery Life

Product Description

Incredible Beauty The ZENBOOK uses a precision-crafted design measuring only 3mm at the front and 9mm at the rear. The form features razor thin edges and a curved center section, which is both practical and attractive - while accommodating the powerful computing components within, this design also looks totally unique. It embodies beauty and strength in complete balance and harmony. Incredible Speed ASUS is proud to deliver the world's first ultrabook with SATA 6Gb/s solid state storage, making for an amazingly smooth and fast computing experience. Additionally, all ASUS ZENBOOK models ship with USB 3.0 as standard, multiplying the transfer rates of current USB 2.0 by as much as a factor of ten! Combined, SSD storage and USB 3.0 create incredible speed of data transfer rates.

ASUS Zenbook UX31E-DH52 13.3-Inch Thin and Light Ultrabook (Silver Aluminum) Review

I received the Zenbook a week ago and have the following to report, addressing most buyers concerns (including myself) when wanting to purchase the Zenbook:

I do hope you find it useful - please vote this up if you did, to inform prospective buyers. Thanks!

Physical outlook:
The Zenbook largely resembles the MacBook Air in terms of svelteness. Even the tapering of the chasis 17mm-3mm is the same as the MacBook. This is a good thing because the Zenbook looks better than the MacBook air. The edges look more clean cut, more industrial looking. Definitely something for the corporate board.

Keyboard:
This is a hit and miss issue with many users. You either love it or hate it. I found the keyboard better than the MacBook because I could actually type faster on this laptop.
1. The keys have much lesser travel than the MacBook Air.
2. They are well spaced.

Some people were complaining about how unresponsive the keys would be. I had found that to be true when I first used the laptop, but adapted to the typing style, applying a little more pressure with each keystroke. Now I can type faster than I can with my iMac wireless keyboard!
It's just a matter of getting used to.

Poor Trackpad:
This is perhaps one of my most pertinent gripes about the Zenbook. The trackpad, like the keyboard is a matter of getting used to. Asus did a poor job in this aspect because they did not standardize the parts used in their Zenbook series. Some Zenbooks came with the Elan touchpad. Others came with the more inferior Sentallics branded touchpad. Both touchpads had different drivers - and performance. The sentallics version performed poorly even with updated drivers and felt like using a year 20000-esque trackpad. There was very poor control over the trackpad, it seemed to have a mind of it's own - especially when using multitouch gestures.

I managed to get the Elan trackpad, and my experience was not better off. When using two fingers on the trackpad in Opera (one finger on left click, the other to move the cursor around) the Zenbook did not recognize this even though my other finger was on the left click BUTTON. It kept recognizing this as a pinch and zoom, resizing the page I was browsing. This is irritating as I have to adapt to using the laptop with one finger. MacBook Airs don't even have a specific left click button and they don't accidentally recgnize my gestures as pinch to zoom. In this aspect, Asus has tragically failed in one of the key aspects of interaction with a laptop - the touchpad.

Slow SSD:
As with the trackpad, the Zenbook shipped with two 128GB SSD variants, the slower Sandisk u100 and the faster, more superior ADATA SANDFORCE. I received the Sandisk variant and I'm seriously having buyers remorse on the purchase. Major reviewers (engadget, anandtech, pocketlint, ars technica) somehow received the superior ADATA variants as their test units, and based their judgement on the drive they received. Most buyers purchase because of the positive reviews made by them. Their reviews would have been much different with the SANDISK SSD.

What Asus did was misleading, and very inappropriate. Advertising the faster ADATA SSD's then shipping other units with the lousier Sandisk units.

The benchmarks I done using Crystal Disk Mark showed the vast difference in speeds. Below:

SANDISK
Size Read Write
4K 16.92 12.49
512K 253.2 21.81******
1GB 460.2 247.1

ADATA (Data from notebookcheck.net)
SIZE Read Write
4K 26.38 51.15
512K 374.7 131.7*****
1GB 429.6 132.8

As you can see, the speeds on the ADATA is easily 6 times faster on write speeds. The 1GB is similar but for day to day usage like surfing and microsoft office, the most commonly used size is below 512K. Thus, the ADATA offers a tremendous speed increase compared to the Sandisk.
As a consumer paying the same amount for a laptop, it is only fair that we receive what we expect. There should be no deviation from what Asus advertises and what we receive.

In this instance, getting a perfect Zenbook combination was like striking the lottery given the amount of permutations given. We only have a 1 in 4 chance of getting both the Elan touchpad and ADATA SSD.

Wireless Problem:
Many users were facing problems with their Wireless card receiving slow speeds. An updated driver would solve the problem. I did not experience the Wifi problem and the Zenbook worked fine out of the box.
I found that the weak wireless problem may be attributed to the Power Options settings. Goto power options -> change plan settings -> changed advanced power settings -> Wireless Adapter settings -> Power saving mode -> MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE.

Audio Hissing Sound:
Some users complained (in the UX21 reviews) that they heard very loud hissing sounds coming out of their earphone port with earphones. I did not hear it on my unit. Perhaps he received a lemon?

In conculsion:
Truth be said, I am not an Apple fan and was very happy to see such a good looking ultraportable that trumps the MacBook Air's air of sexiness. The zenbook is downright awesome to look at. The full aluminium chasis offers the kind of durability no other laptop can offer in it's class.

But with further comparison, the Apple ships with same compenents across the board. We appreciate this reliablility because we KNOW what components we are getting.

We aren't playing the lottery Asus, and this Zenbook certainly isn't my idea of a $1000 lottery ticket.

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