This weekend I took the ASUS Zenbook UX31E on a road trip. I had to travel and I had to work while travelling so this was an ideal opportunity to assess how well this ultrabook coped under pressure. The first things that struck me were – how the weight barely affected my luggage, the battery life when used to type out lengthy documents, and the heat.
Obviously the fact that the Zenbook is a mere 1,4kgs is why it hardly makes a dent on your luggage; however, it is also small enough to fit into regulation aeroplane hand luggage. If you’ve ever wrestled a slightly too large bag into the hand luggage measuring rack, you’ll know how important this is. Few things are as terrifying as the prospect of your laptop flying solo in the hold…
The battery life was a surprise. Thanks to the fact that Battery Eater Pro doesn’t compute when it comes to 64bit editions of Windows 7, I couldn’t run my usual battery benchmark to test the UX31E under pressure. This was sort of the next best thing.
I took the Zenbook out at the meeting on Friday morning and the first half an hour was taken up by people wanting to play around with it. I have to say that I was surprised by how people reacted to this ultrabook from ASUS. Many of the businessmen who had to regularly fly long haul were particularly interested in the UX31E, asking me how well it handled a multitude of processing tasks simultaneously and how the battery life handled.
The way it looked and felt was also a big hit. The only point where the Zenbook UX31E met with criticism was the keyboard. I have mentioned in a previous post that it needs some welly at first and some found this to be a bit of a problem. However, it is worth noting that this was soon glossed over once they got to play around with it. The high points included the smooth operation, slick Instant On feature that really IS instantaneous, the looks, the power and the specs.
The battery life was put under quite a bit of pressure over the entire three days. I charged it up on Friday and didn’t take it near a power point again for the rest of the weekend. It was only on a low level by today, Monday morning. And it was used to write documents, research on the web, and for about five different business paws played around with it for several hours at a time.
Now, I found this pretty impressive, all things considered. While the Zenbook UX31E wasn’t used to play power-intensive games or power hungry applications, it still held its own impressively for an entire weekend.
The next question is how the ASUS Zenbook UX31E handled the heat. Well, it wasn’t noticeable over the weekend but I did have some ideas as to how to put it to the test so stay tuned…
Tamsin