Asus Zenbook UX31E (Core i7 1.8GHz Processor, 4GB RAM)

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the MacBook Air should be positively blushing right around now. A sudden onslaught of Ultrabooks--the Intel-coined term for thin, MacBook Air-esque Windows laptops with fast boot times and sleek, high-end designs--has hit just in time for the holidays, and one of the most highly hyped ones we've seen is the Asus Zenbook, a product that doesn't shy away from an Apple-like design whatsoever. That's not such a bad thing: Who doesn't want a thin, unibody metal, lightweight laptop that starts fast and has a great battery life?

The 13-inch Asus Zenbook, despite looking at least as expensive and high-end as laptops such as the Samsung Series 9, has a starting price of S$1,498 (US$1,099), which includes 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD drive. That's about S$200 less expensive than the equivalent MacBook Air. Smartly, the Zenbook gets that part right: When competing with a product as singularly well-known and highly rated as the MacBook Air, your product has to be either better or cheaper.

Cheaper, it is: As for better, I'd have to disagree. Excellent speakers, sleek design, and a high-resolution screen are accompanied by a finicky keyboard and touchpad, giving the ever-so-slightly-off sensation when working on the Zenbook. It feels like the opposite of the silky-smooth experience on a MacBook Air. Battery life is short of the Air's lofty numbers, too. Nearly 5 hours isn't shabby, but it's not industry-leading.

Those are somewhat minor issues for what's otherwise a very solid and impressive thin laptop, but at its price, these are issues anyone would pay attention to. The 13-inch Zenbook UX31 gets more expensive in 256GB SSD and Core i7 configurations, climbing up to S$1,998 (US$1,449) at its highest price. If I were buying a Zenbook, I'd stick with our S$1,498 review model and live with the limitations, glad that I had a MacBook Air-alike that saved me a few dollars along the way. If your idea of an Ultrabook is a Windows version of a MacBook Air with a slightly lower price, then consider the Zenbook your product. Just be forewarned that the keyboard, touchpad, and battery life are less impressive than the audio/visual bells and whistles.

Design

Take the Asus Zenbook out of its foam-lined jewel-box packaging, and you might think you'd accidentally bought a MacBook Air. The experience is that similar, down to the square plastic wall charger with a removable plug tip. The Zenbook, made of unibody aluminum like the MacBook Air, has a darker gloss to its back lid and a heft that makes it almost feel more like magnesium or steel. Radial metal lines on the back catch light and give the Zenbook an industrial-design flavor. Inside, the metal surfaces are brushed in a subtle vertical pattern. Brushed metal on the bottom is only interrupted by a rear speaker grill and four black rubber feet.

Price as reviewed / Starting Price	S$1,498
Processor	1.7GHz Intel Core i5 2557M
Memory	4GB, 1,333MHz DDR3
Hard Drive	128GB SSD
Chipset	Intel QS67
Graphics	Intel HD Graphics 3000
Operating system	Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
Dimensions (WD)	32.5 x 22.4 cm
Height	1.7 cm
Screen size (diagonal)	13.3-inch
System weight	1.3 kg
Category	Ultraportable

The bladelike teardrop shape of the Zenbook is even curved like a MacBook Air, but it's slightly more bulbous: Its 17mm of maximum thickness is cleverly concealed, but I could tell the difference when I slipped it into a messenger bag. A weight of 1.3kg is still light, but it's a tad heavier than the MacBook Air, Acer S3, and Lenovo IdeaPad U300s.

Ports line the sides of the Zenbook UX31, just like on the MacBook Air. USB, an SD card slot, and a headphone jack line the left side, while a USB 3.0 port, Mini DisplayPort, and Micro-HDMI port line the right. There isn't any Ethernet jack, but Asus includes a USB-to-Ethernet and VGA dongle with the Zenbook, along with an attractive brown, nylon mailer-envelope-style sleeve to protect your laptop investment.

The Zenbook's got a great coffee-shop quotient: It's easy to slip into and out of a bag, and odds are you'll draw a fair amount of casual attention from nearby latte-sippers when using it. I found that fellow office-workers were more eager to check it out than the typical laptop. Asus spent a lot of effort on the Zenbook's design, and it shows.

The magnetic hinge that keeps the Zenbook closed works somewhat like a MacBook Air's, but the narrow lip is harder to catch with your fingers and pull apart. Sometimes it worked perfectly, other times I had to fiddle a bit. Once it opens, the interior's clean and crisp design offers an unencumbered keyboard seated up near the screen and a very large--about as large as a MacBook Air's--multitouch clickpad, with dedicated click zones underneath delineated with a simple little black dividing line.

Alas, if only that keyboard and touchpad could come close to what a MacBook provides. The flat, square raised keys are too shallow and mushy for my taste, but it's more than that: I mistyped quite a bit when keys didn't seem to register. The keyboard's top row of function keys does double duty for volume control and screen brightness, and the power button's part of this same row on the far right. All buttons required me to simultaneously press Fn to raise/lower volume and the like, which killed some of the elegance. The keyboard also lacks backlighting, and the black-on-silver key lettering can be hard to read at off angles.

The touch pad isn't the more common Synaptics version, but a Sentelic that, while offering similar two- and three-finger gesture controls, wasn't as responsive consistently--even when we installed the latest driver updates. Neither the keyboard nor the touchpad is a deal breaker, but they mar the supposed Zen-like feel I felt that Asus hopes we achieve via the Zenbook. Love at first sight didn't describe my ergonomic experience.

Features

Asus includes some software tools on the Zenbook that should feel familiar to owners of other Asus computers. Lifeframe, Asus' Webcam program, is as chock-full of odd backgrounds and extra features as always. Instant On is a desktop widget that promises faster wake-up from sleep. I activated it (who wouldn't?) and found a cold powered-off boot-up to take around 16 seconds, but wake-up from sleep by lifting the lid was indeed snappy, coming in right around the promised 2-second mark. A clever battery life widget shows not only the estimated hours left of use, but estimated hours for game play, "office operation", video playback, and Internet browsing. Asus promises two weeks of standby time when in sleep mode, but I wasn't able to test this in the limited time I've spent with the laptop. A data-save feature will save the laptop's data when the battery dips below 5 percent, much like Apple's MacBooks already do quite well.

The 13.3-inch glossy glass screen is framed in a bezel that's not edge-to-edge, but will be familiar to MacBook Air users, too. The screen resolution is an impressive 1,600 x 900 pixels, well above the 1,366 x 768 pixels on other Ultrabooks and mainstream laptops. I was able to fit more onto the screen--more documents, more text--and the finer resolution wasn't a big strain to my eyes. While the screen's very bright, colors and viewing angles aren't quite as spectacular. I tilted the screen and found the picture quality degraded faster than an IPS-style screen.

Asus touts the audio on the Zenbook, and it lives up to the billing. I loved listening to music and movies via the Bang & Olufson-designed speakers, situated under the laptop. Their resonance and quality were a step above other thin laptops I've used. They're not the best laptop speakers I've ever experienced, but for the size, they might be.

The included Webcam's a letdown: I booted up Lifeframe and discovered that the camera had a 640 x 480-pixel maximum resolution. That's no better than a budget laptop, and doesn't fit the sticker price.

	Asus UX31E	Average for category (Ultraportable)
Video	Mini VGA, micro HDMI	VGA plus HDMI or DisplayPort
Audio	Stereo speakers, headphone/microphone jack	Stereo speakers, headphone/microphone jacks
Data	1 USB 3.0, 1 USB 2.0, SD card reader	3 USB 2.0, SD card reader
Expansion	None	None
Networking	Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth	Ethernet, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, optional mobile broadband
Optical drive	None	None

Despite being so small, the Zenbook UX31E manages to include all the ports I'd expect on a larger laptop, including USB 3.0 and HDMI. Some of the ports are limited in number (only 1 USB 2.0 and 1 USB 3.0) or size (Micro-HDMI, mini VGA), but dongles for VGA and Ethernet make up for what's missing better than Apple's MacBook Air or the Samsung Series 9 do. I wish this had a standard HDMI port--I hate using dongles. Of course the optical drive's intentionally left out, as it is across all Ultrabooks.

The 13-inch Zenbook UX31 (there's also an 11-inch model, the UX21) comes in three configuration varieties, starting at S$1,498 (US$1,099) for this review unit, the UX31E-RY009V: A Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB SSD storage. That's US$200 less than the equivalent 13-inch MacBook Air, or US$100 less than a comparable Lenovo IdeaPad U300s. The 256GB SSD configuration bumps the price to US$1,349, and upgrading to a Core i7 CPU brings the price to US$1,449. Still, even at that lofty price, it beats the top-end MacBook Air by US$100 while offering a better processor, and gives more bang for the buck than the Lenovo IdeaPad U300s. You can't argue that the Asus Zenbook isn't a relative value.

Performance and Battery Life

A 1.7GHz Core i5 2557M processor is technically a low-voltage CPU, but it's the same generation of processor that's in laptops like the Lenovo IdeaPad U300s, Acer Aspire S3, and Apple MacBook Air. In performance tests, the entry-level Zenbook managed to outperform both the Acer Aspire S3 and Lenovo IdeaPad U300s in general, even though the gains were sometimes slight. Experientially, I found it was an excellent experience for all-around computing. Unless you're doing heavy video editing, graphics work, or gaming, you won't notice the processing compromise. Multitasking and video streaming in HD were all excellent, as would be expected.

With the included Intel integrated graphics, I didn't expect this system to be used for much gaming, and neither should you, if by gaming you're thinking of Call of Duty. With the higher-resolution 1,600 x 900-pixel screen, you should expect basic casual games and mainstream gaming with settings turned down, but not much more.

With its integrated battery, the Asus Zenbook UX31E lasted through four hours and 45 minutes of video playback before needing a recharge. That's not bad at all, but I expected a little more. The battery outperformed the Acer Aspire S3, but the Lenovo IdeaPad U300s fared a little better. Battery life expectations have been blown open by laptops like the Toshiba Portege and Apple MacBook Air, which each exceeded seven hours on the same test. While you could get a lot of computing done on roughly five hours of battery life (more if you adjust battery modes and usage), you would be justified in envying any laptop that bested it, like the Air.

Conclusion

Windows owners hoping for their own MacBook Air get closer than ever with the Asus Zenbook UX31E, with the added benefit of a greater variety of ports and a lower price. The Zenbook is less expensive on a pure processor/spec comparison than the MacBook Air. The Zenbook's underwhelming keyboard, battery life, and Webcam could be turn-offs for some, while the higher-resolution screen and high-quality onboard speakers might seal the deal for others.

Service and Support

Asus has a two-year limited global hardware warranty for this notebook, including accidental damage protection. Online support is available for issues related to Windows and the bundled software. Users can extend the product warranty within 180 days of purchase, but prices vary depending on region and configuration. It's best to check directly with your local retailer.

System configurations
Asus UX31E-DH52
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 1.7GHz Intel Core i5 2557M; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 64MB (Dedicated) Intel GMA HD; 128GB Solid State Drive

Toshiba Portege R835-P56X
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 2.3GHz Intel Core i5 2410M; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 64MB (Dedicated)/1696MB (Total) Intel GMA HD; 640GB Hitachi 5,400rpm

Lenovo IdeaPad U300s
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 1.8GHz Intel Core i7 2677M; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 64MB (Shared) Intel HD 3000; 256GB JMicron 616 Solid State Drive

Acer Aspire S3-951-6646
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 1.6GHz Intel Core i5 2467M; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 128MB (Shared) Intel HD 3000; 320GB Hitachi 5,400rpm + 20GB Solid State Drive

Apple Macbook Air 13.3-inch - Summer 2011
OS X 10.7 Lion; 1.7GHz Intel Core i5 2557M; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 384MB (Shared) Intel HD 3000; 128GB Apple Solid State Drive

Dell XPS 14z
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 2.8GHz Intel Core i7 2640M; 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 520M / 1GB(Dedicated) Intel GMA HD; 750GB Western Digital 7,200rpm