Review of Asus Zenbook UX301

The supporters: The Asus Zenbook UX301 packs in a lot, including a better-than-HD touch screen, big 256GB SSD, and Core i7 processor, in a slim, smart design.

 "Parts are better than what you pay. Quiet effcient. Computer is responsive and fast."

"long lasting battery life, fast, quiet and cool"

"It also contains enough ports and has a decent keyboard and a very smooth mouse."

"I really like the battery support for this laptop. It lasts very long as of my experience."

 

The opponents:  It costs more than most comparable better-then-HP laptops, including the Retina MacBook Pro. The Zenbook doesn't feel as rugged as its price warrants, and its battery life is unimpressive.

"sound quality is ehh, the wifi card is a pain sometimes"

"touch pad bar click loud like a toy clicker, fingerprints easily lid and touchpad"

  

Neutral: Asus was one of the first PC makers to go ultra-thin with its Zenbook line. That latest UX301 version packs in nearly every high-end spec you'd want, but it's priced out of reach for most, and lacks an all-day battery.

The Asus UX301 joins the Toshiba KiraBook, Apple MacBook Pro, Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro, Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus, and others in offering a touch screen that goes beyond 1080p. In this case, it's a 2,560x1,440 display, which has so far proven to be slightly more common than the 3,200x1,800 version found in the Yoga 2 and Razer's upcoming Blade 14.  

In either case, it's a lot of pixels to push on such a small screen, but there are definite benefits in reading on-screen text and editing high-resolution photos. It's not an extra feature that counts as a must-have just yet, but just as touch screens have gone from oddity to standard feature in less than two years, I can see these higher resolutions coming to more and more laptops in the near future. 

Hopefully, many of those future models won't cost quite as much as as this one. At $1,899 (it's about $50 less at most online stores), this configuration of the UX301 is about as expensive as non-gaming laptops get. The components are appropriately premium, to be sure, with an Intel Core i7 CPU and big 256GB SSD, but only 8GB of RAM and no other particularly unique features, aside from scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass 3 on both sides of the lid. A 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro with similar specs (but minus the touch screen, of course), is $1,799. Likewise, a similarly configured Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus can be found for about $1,750, with an even higher-res 3,200x1,800 screen. 

 Connections, performance, and battery (☞ http://www.laptop-battery.org.uk)

On a slim ultrabook-style laptop, you're not going to find a lot of ports and connections. The main compromise here is the inclusion of two off-size video outputs, micro-HDMI and mini-DVI, instead of a single full-size port, as in the case of the similar Toshiba Kirabook, which has a regular HDMI port. More options are great in theory, but you'll need to carry around a pocketful of dongles to make it work. Two USB ports is acceptable, but many ultrabooks offer three.
  
Design and features
The Zenbook was one of the first laptops to truly embrace the ultrabook vibe, with slim, tapered metal shells, and lids that stood out from the crowd with a circular pattern that some say resembled rippling water. Here the same effect is generated not in aluminum, but but under a Gorilla Glass 3 lid, over a dark blue background. The big difference between this and other recent slim ultrabook-style laptops we've tested is the incredibly high gloss finish on the back of the lid -- as one would expect from a glass top layer. 
The large clickpad-style touch pad is much better than the versions found on the early Zenbooks of years ago. Back then, touchpad response was finicky, and multi-touch gestures were near-useless. This version is as good as any Windows laptop, with quick response and natural-feeling inertial scrolling, but I had to turn off the Windows 8 edge gestures because they were too easy to accidentally trigger. 

The 13.3-inch 2,560x1,440 touch screen display is a system highlight. Covered with edge-to-edge glass, the touch response was excellent and off-axis viewing was decent, but not best-in-class. The ultra-high resolution allows for an amazing level of zoom, and you can pinch-to-zoom on pages of text to see the effect up close. The glossy screen does, however, have a lot of glare under normal lighting conditions, so you may end up twisting and turning to find a glare-free angle. (TOSHIBA PA5109U-1BRS batteries )

The speakers are from Bang & Olufsen ICEpower, a subsidiary of the famous audio company, and sound decent for such a small laptop, although that may be because they're fired from side-edge speakers, which gives you an especially wide stereo image.