Asus UX32A Zenbook 13.3-inch Laptop (Silver) - (Intel Core i5 3317 1.7GHz, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, WLAN, Webcam, BT, Integrated Graphics, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit)

I was eyeing up the UX31A but deemed it too expensive and with image and text size issues due to the high (but not quite high enough!) resolution screen, I chose the cheaper option, the UX32A. The build quality is identical and feels very premium! There is no flex of any note in the casing, and it looks very aesthetically pleasing as any good Mac-clone should! The backlit keys are nice.

This laptop is a dream to use! It feels like a Macbook Air but with Windows instead of IOS! Just what I was looking for. The battery life, screen contrast and brightness are fantastic! The keyboard is very pleasurable to type on, with good size keys, good travel and nice surfaces and sound. The touchpad is excellently sized with a nice smooth surface and lovely drivers to produce mac-like smooth two-finger scrolling, two-finger tapping for right click etc. More control over the touchpad functions would be nice, however. Maybe future drivers will provide! The instant-on feature is nice to have but as the small SSD is only used for caching, is not quite as quick as advertised, but is quick nonetheless. The speakers give great boom for their buck considering the size of the laptop, perfect for watching movies or television from under 10 feet away.

The lack of SSD-only storage does irk at times when the constant albeit quiet clicking of the computer caching the HDD data onto the SSD makes noise during quiet times. This, however, is not a problem considering the lack of SSD is reflected in the price. Otherwise the bloatware is a minor inconvenience, but can be sorted with effort. Rather annoying is now when the non-Asus sleep mode is used, the touchpad's extra functions such as two-finger scrolling and three-finger swipes are not always reactivated on wake-up. The lack of a palm-check for the touchpad is definitely a problem that many will suffer from but I have been able to avoid it thus far, so it does not worry me to any great extent.

All in all a decent buy. To improve I would add an SSD, add a retina-screen and improve some of the above problems, but then it is the UX31A and £900 more expensive! Thus for the price it is very desirable when compared to the competition's equivalents.

Short conclusion: Asus has had to make some sacrifices to get the UX32A to this price point, but it's still worth every penny. Consider this, seriously, for your highly portable productivity companion on the go.

Preface:

I have been interested in getting a thin and light laptop as a productivity companion on the go, when I'm away from my main machine at home. I had tried Asus' own Transformer Prime, that was an Android tablet with a keyboard dock, providing the capability for productivity while also giving the "play" aspects of a tablet. However, this did not prove too fruitful, as many productivity applications on there functioned slowly or we're just not as full featured as I needed them to be. So my return to Windows on a proper laptop came about. And my purchasing decision lands on the UX32A, the stripped back version of the full-on UX31A (AKA the Zenbook Prime).

Design:

Asus have a very good design team (though one could argue Apple are their largest influence). In the UX32A they have designed a beautiful, solid piece of work. The silver aluminium contrasted by black chiclet keys is certainly reminiscent of the Mac Book line of products, however the aluminium itself is vertically brushed instead of a matted feel that Apple's line gives. This actually gives a much cleaner look, as well as reinforcing the industrial design. The lid is a more contrasting gun-metal/grey hue that is once again brushed aluminium, however it is orbitally brushed instead of in a straight line. This gives any light bouncing off the lid an interesting circular style reflection. The ASUS logo can be found on both the center of the lid, and centrally positioned underneath the screen, facing the user. This is in an unbrushed, polished metal.

The laptop isn't the thinnest Intel's Ultrabook collection has to offer (the Samsung Series 9 being thinner), however it still can hold its own. It measures, at the spine, just a few millimeters thicker than the Mac Book Air and tapers off as it moves to the foot of the laptop. Despite the ultra thinness, Asus has still managed to engineer three USB 3.0 ports, a full sized HDMI port, a mini DisplayPort, and a SD Card reader, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a proprietary looking power connection into the thin frame. This gives a gamut of connection options, in general storage, devices, and displays. Interestingly, no mini Ethernet port is present, and neither is it present in the UX31A. Asus have obviously made the assumption that buyers are going "all wireless" with this laptop. USB adapters are easily obtainable, however. This should be apparent, by now, but there is no optical drive with this laptop, as it is just too thin to accomodate one. If you are wanting a thin(ish) laptop that has an optical drive, Asus' own S56CM will be the next port of call for you.

The chiclet keys are nicely spaced, and are backlit. They key travel could be a little further to really give the feeling of the key being pressed. However this niggle is forgiven with how thin a frame we are talking about in the UX32A. The trackpad will be covered in hardware.

Hardware:

The Asus UX32A is a stripped back version of the UX31, which is the big daddy Asus sells for £1500. Obviously, to cut the price by over half, Asus have had to make some sacrifices.

Instead of the I7 found in the UX31, the UX32A see's an I5 clocked for a top speed of 2.6 GHz, and can operate as low as 800MHz. This isn't a huge deal, both chips are Ivy Bridge architecture, meaning that you are getting the very low power operation this architecture affords. You only lose a more aggressive clock speed management paradigm, and hyperthreading. Hyperthreading is an ability of Intel's I7 chips to run two simultaneous threads into each core of the processor at once. The long and short of this means that you're going to lose performance if CAD/CAM or other heavily processor dependent applications are your thing. Still, the I5 performs admirably, to the level you can expect from an Intel chip.

Instead of a 256GB SSD, the UX32A get's a conventional 5400RPM hard drive with 500GB of capacity. Also, you get a 24GB SSD that acts as a sort of cache between the hard drive and the processor/memory. While this will theoretically speed up the laptop by not needing to access the physical drive as much, it is questionable just how much of a performance benefit this gives. However this cache is what Asus deems responsible for it's "instant on" technology. While a conventional hard drive (and a 5400RPM one at that, come on Asus, it isn't 2011 anymore) may be a hard pill to swallow when compared to what it replaced, the extra capacity means you can store more media and programs on there. And you don't need to worry about the hard drive "wearing out" as SSD's will inevitably do over time. The sugar coating on the bitter pill, however, is that hard drive is swappable. Meaning that if you fancy making an upgrade later down the line, you are totally green-lit to slip in an SSD of your own. At the time of writing this review, a 256 GB SSD can go for as little as £130, while a decent quality one usually goes for £150. They are expected to drop even further this year (2013), so do keep that in mind.

The same 4GB of RAM you get in the UX31 is what you get here. To be precise, you get 4GB of 1600MHz DDR3 at CAS 10. Interestingly, 2GB of this memory is freely upgrade-able, like the hard drive. The other 2GB is soldered to the mainboard, and is thus untouchable. So if you ever wished to upgrade the RAM, you only have 2GB to upgrade. Meaning that if you wanted to replace the 2GB stick with a 4GB stick, you could end up with 6GB overall. It's a bizarre situation, however one I suspect Asus wanted to make possible without sacrificing any of the thinness.

Now, to the big sacrifice. The 1080p IPS panel of the UX31 is replaced by a 1366 x 768 TN panel in the UX32A. Screen resolution and quality is a big thing for many people. If this is the case for you, then do consider yourself warned. This panel is distinctly average, 768p being a very common resolution at this screen size. The TN panel has worse viewing angle data than IPS displays, and isn't as bright as the UX31. Despite this, it functions fine, and when you think of the kind of price point Asus is wanting to hit with this laptop, it's an inevitable sacrifice.

Sound is handled by a Bang and Olufsen, most notable for their premium quality sound systems reserved for the very top end of buyers and audio enthusiasts. Sound is above average for a laptop of this thinness. The B&O speakers can really output some sound from them, and provide a bit of bass, too, which is uncommon.

Graphics are handled by the I5's inbuilt HD4000 graphics processor. You're not going to be gaming or using Photoshop on this thing, but you will be able to do most tasks without needing to worry about graphics processing power.

Wifi and Bluetooth is handled by an Intel 6235 card. This connects via a standard mini PCI-E slot, which is appreciated in a laptop as thin as this (you'd expect such things to be soldered to the board, and thus not upgrade-able).

The 2MP webcam is par for the course. It will provide an image when video conferencing, though for a laptop of this price, you would have expected something a little higher spec.

The battery is a 7.2V, 6520mAh, 48Whr Lithium Ion unit, weighing in at 280 grams (around 20% of the overall weight). In battery saving mode (CPU clocked at 800MHz, screen brightness low, keyboard backlight off), the laptop will give you between 4 and 5 hours use, which is average for laptops of this ilk. Cranking up to a performance mode will see this time cut by up to half depending on what you're doing.

Software:

Windows 7 is Windows 7. You get the 64 Bit iteration of Windows, which is good, it means you're accessing all 4GB of that memory, and are using the I5 to its fullest potential.

Asus packages a comprehensive, but mostly bloatware, software suite. This includes software that can access Asus' cloud service, useless connecting options, some facial recognition software for logon (that I wouldn't touch with a 10ft pole for security reasons), and many other things you'll never bother with. The only useful additions Asus add are a widget for switching power profiles, multi-touch gestures, and "Asus Tutor", which essentially shows you all the stuff you can do with the gestures etc. The instant on technology certainly does work, however a fast boot is native to Windows 7 anyway, so I'm unsure why they've added in something that's already there. The best multi-touch gesture Asus have built in is the three finger swipe upwards that goes into Window's Aero Flip mode. From there, a three finger swipe either left or right flips through previews all your open applications; and then a three finger swipe back down will bring on top the application you selected. It operates quite similar to Mac OS's "Expose" gesture, and is a great time saver. Two finger scrolling is a given, and is mostly accurate, with only some applications being funny with it. Talking about the trackpad, overall, it isn't as good as one found on one of Apple's products. However it is responsive in its own right, and mostly accurate. You only suffer from some inaccuracy and slowdown when trying to make some finer movements.

McAfee AV software is pre-installed, and you have a year's license. It is advised you get rid of McAfee immediately, as it truly does bloat down your laptop and make it feel very sluggish. As soon as I removed it (and installed another AV software, ESET Smart Security 6), the laptop sped up considerably. This could be seen not only in the responsiveness, but the hard drive access light didn't flicker half as much as it did with McAfee. Read more ›

I spent almost a month extensively researching laptops before deciding to buy the UX32A. There are many superficial reviews out there (techradar, expertreviews and whatnot). Then there are a couple of superb, detailed review sites from which you will really learn what makes a good laptop: notebookcheck and anandtech. I would suggest to anyone looking at buying this (or any) laptop to read the reviews on these two sites.

Now to my own experience from having bought this machine 3 weeks ago:

It is light, fast, has a lovely backlit keyboard, a very robust sleep/hibernate function and power options that ensure battery is well conserved. The best part (and unlike the macbook air and many many other ultrabooks out there) the RAM can be upgraded (from the current 4GB upto a maximum of 10GB) and the hard disk can be upgraded (from the 500GB 'traditional' hard disk to a fast SSD of upto 500GB and probably 1TB in the future). Unlike many people (esp on amazon.com) who have immediately upgraded I haven't, because I find this machine is fast enough as it is. I am a light user doing browsing, word processing, playing music and movies, and after my 5 yo netbook this thing is super quick.