The ultrabook is Intel's initiative to bring super-light and slim but powerful ultraportable laptops with good battery life to market. The Asus Zenbook UX31 is one of the first notebooks to conform to Intel's Ultrabook specification.
Asus Zenbook UX31 Review
The Asus Zenbook UX31 looks great and feels incredibly rigid and robust. The UX31 is all about design -- and it is truly stunning. The chassis has almost zero flex and the lid is just as strong. It measures 0.66 by 12.79 by 8.78 inches (HWD), and is roughly the same size as the Apple MacBook Air and Acer Aspire S3. With a 13.3-inch screen tucked inside, the chassis is small enough to carry around without too much trouble. The Asus Zenbook UX31 features a USB 2.0 port, a USB 3.0 port, a micro HDMI and mini VGA ports, a mic in/headphones out jack and an SD card reader.
The Asus Zenbook UX31 runs on a ULV second gen Sandy Bridge Core i5 CPU, and there's a Core i7 option. The i5-2557M runs at 1.7GHz and the Core i7-2677M runs at 1.8GHz (both support Turbo Boost). You'll get 4GB or RAM with all 13-inch models, as well as a 128 or 256GB solid state drive (SSD). The Zenbooks use Intel HD 300 integrated graphics.
The display is one of the highlights of this notebook. Not only is the display bright and colorful; it has a very welcome high resolution of 1600x900 pixels. It's a 450 nit brightness panel that's viewable outdoors, and it's glossy. Image quality is excellent, with accurate colours and ample contrast. The Zenbook UX31 also has wider viewing angles than the Acer S3, making it better suited to sharing the screen with another person.
The laptop has a chiclet-style keyboard that shares the square tile layout of the MacBook Air 13-inch, but adds a new luxurious element with metal keys. The arrow keys are smaller than what you'll find on the 13-inch Air, but they were pretty easy to find by feel. Despite having very little travel, each key felt springy and responsive, so we could type at full speed right away. Measuring 4.1 x 2.75 inches, the UX31's Sentelic-powered touchpad is almost as large as the MacBook Air's (4.1 x 3 inches) and includes integrated buttons. The oversized touchpad has a smooth surface. This is a clickpad; press down anywhere to produce a click.
The fantastic design, sturdy build quality and excellent performance make the UX31 an incredibly desirable machine. The ASUS Zenbook UX31ffers a wafer-thin aluminum chassis, fast performance, instant resume, and good battery life--and adds even better audio and a higher-resolution display. It's incredibly slim, lightweight and sturdy enough to be chucked in a bag and carted off around town.
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