The inch UX31 is touch heavier and larger than the UX21, but it also means it has more room to include an internal SD Card reader and a larger solid state drive, which drives up the price tag for the three variants of this model. The Zenbook comes equipped with a large touchpad that recognizes left and right mouse clicks when you tap within designated areas.
Like most laptops these days, it offers a chiclet keyboard but with large enough keys that have just enough curve for all-day typing, even for those with large digits. Unfortunately, its power button in the same place as on the MacBook Air so I'd be worried about accidentally shutting down my machine when just trying to delete a word! Without a doubt the Zenbook is a beautiful piece of technology, but most of the most interesting innovations of the laptop exist inside the machine.
One of the most handy feature is that the Zenbook will automatically save files before the machine shuts down when you have less than 5-percent battery power left. Personally, I love the look and price of the Zenbook but would prefer the extra power of a dedicated graphics card and convenience of an internal DVD drive that the Lenovo U offers. What about you? Guessing is half the fun! In our earlier coverage I pointed out that ASUS had moved Microsoft's required Certificate of Authenticity to the power brick, something that's usually located on the system itself.
Microsoft mandates the sticker's placement on the system, however there is a clean PC program an OEM can apply for in order to somewhat skirt the requirement. ASUS did apply for and was approved, allowing it the luxury of moving that CoA sticker to the power adapter. While it does improve the beauty of the machine, it also means that if you lose your power adapter you do lose your CoA. Microsoft and Intel were also petitioned to allow greyscale versions of their respective product logos.
ASUS' request was also approved, which is why you see less obnoxious Intel inside and Windows 7 stickers on the Zenbook. At Computex earlier this year Intel announced two technologies that would be featured in some Ultrabooks starting this year: Rapid Start and Smart Connect.
Rapid Start sounds a lot like hibernate to NAND, promising 6 second start times from a very low power state. You can get even quicker start times from suspend to RAM, but you sacrifice standby battery life as you have to keep refreshing data stored in DRAM while your system is asleep.
Rapid Start gets around this issue by apparently storing some, but not all, data in DRAM—reducing the burden on the battery while asleep, and reducing the amount of data that needs to be read off the SSD upon wakeup. ASUS wouldn't detail exactly how it managed to increase STR battery life, just that it spent a lot of time studying what electrical components could be shut down to save power and implements a bunch of its own tricks that its competitors haven't seemed to figure out.
The Apple comparison is inevitable as the MacBook Air is rated for much longer standby time; presumably the advantage there is largely OS X related. The idea behind this one is to have a layer of software that would periodically wake your system up while asleep and fetch all new updates e. Twitter, Facebook, Emails.
With Smart Connect enabled, when you actually do wake up your machine it should be far more up-to-date than it would've been normally. Based on internal ASUS test data and the current amount of battery remaining, the tool estimates how long your battery will last for various workloads.
This data is all static in the sense that it is based on predetermined values and not your current workload. The standby battery life estimate however is a bit more accurate. Based on that power usage it then determines standby time given remaining battery capacity. Since standby power depends in part on what you have in memory, this method of estimation can significantly improve accuracy.
Granted you'll always get a trailing estimate e. Post Your Comment Please log in or sign up to comment.
I'm excited to see the competition over the next few months, as well as what these things will evolve to over time. Privacy Policy. Contact Us. Terms of Use. Show Full Site. All rights reserved. Log in Don't have an account?
Sign up now Username Password Remember Me. Lost your password? We'd gladly throw a few hundred more onto the price to make it happen. In this test we're encoding a p XviD file to H. CNET Australia 's Photoshop CS5 test applies many different filters to a series of RAW files, performs common tasks such as layer creation, image rotation and resizing, then exports to web. It hits all aspects of the system, and it's no surprise the ZenBook comes out on top here.
For our multimedia multitasking test, iTunes is set to encode to MP3 continuously while a Handbrake encode is run in the background; the time taken is when the Handbrake encode stops. Designed to punish the system, every extra bit of performance here counts, the Asus showing what it's got. Our battery test comes in two parts: the heavy test, which loops a p video while the power profile is set to high performance, and the light test, which involves web browsing on a low performance power profile until the battery exhausts itself.
The ZenBook UX21 doesn't get top billing, but then it's got a smaller chassis than the competing units in the test, and therefore less room for battery. We've only just switched to these new benchmarks, so hope to have both the ZenBook UX31 and MacBook Air results added to these charts soon. While the performance is very much there for the ZenBook UX21, it falls tragically short at one of the most important factors: human interaction. The touch pad, screen and keyboard will make you want to pass by this one product — no matter how pretty it is.
We have no doubt Asus is beavering away right now at the successor — we can only hope it addresses these concerns. Craig Simms. Pricing Not Available. The Good Extremely pretty, likely to be a subject of envy amongst colleagues and friends alike.
SandForce SSD drive screams. Sound is great for the form factor. All the way up to Core i7 performance.
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