ASUS UX30 Review: Sophistication Redefined
ASUS UX30 is a CULV laptop and is great to look at. At first glance, it appears to be EEE PCβs big brother, ASUS EEE 1008HA. It measures just over 2cm at its thickest and weighs just 1.5kg.
Looks
When I used this elegant machine in public, few passers-by surely did ask me if I was using a Macbook Air. Now, I took that as a compliment for my machine as Air is considered as one of the most sleek notebooks.
Its looks can fit in both work and home environments. The lid is made of aluminum and rest of the chassis is made of strong plastic which does not twist or bend, even with strong pressure applied.
Display
Like the Macbook Air, it has the 13.3-inches screen size. It uses LED backlighting that produces great colors with good saturation levels. The display has decent resolution too, at 1366×768, it surely does display more text at a time. The text looks sharp and is easy to read. The screen is glossy though.
Keyboard
The keys are chiclet like, similar to the ones found in SONY VAIO X and SONY VAIO P. This type of keyboard also used in the Macbook Air. So how is the typing experience? Great. The keys are of the same size as found in the SONY VAIO X, but have better tactile feedback.
In other words, any one would be able to get accustomed to its keyboard in less than 5 minutes. The touchpad is big enough and is responsive. There is a single bar below the touchpad that has left and right click buttons.
You need to apply some pressure to get the clicks registered.
Performance
Our machine came with Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 pre-installed. ASUS is offering a free upgrade to the Windows 7 Home Premium. The performance with the Vista was decent.
The Intel Core 2 Duo SU3500 CULV processor, coupled with Intel GMA 4500MHD processor offer satisfactory performance. However, I did faced some slowdowns here and there, thanks to the Norton Internet Security, which came pre-installed. I would suggest you all to uninstall it immediately after booting-up. It will significantly improve the performance.
The GMA 4500MHD is great for casual tasks. Just do not expect to play 3D games on it. Games that came 3-4 years back, wonβt have any problems running on this laptop. Youtube, Youtube full screen, Youtube HD, Youtube HD full screen all ran fine without any problems.
HD TUNE test
W-Prime Test
Speakers
There are two speakers, both located beneath. They are loud and crisp. However, for any serious music listening, you have to use headphones as they lack bass just like any other laptop speakers.
Ports
On the left side, you will find a mini port for connecting a VGA cable (converter included), HDMI, LAN and 1 USB 2.0 port. The flap is a mixed blessing. On one hand, it prevents dust from getting inside the ports and on the other hand, you can face a bit of trouble in getting some USB devices to properly plugin. For example: one of my flash USB drives refused to get it. This is the same problem I faced when reviewing the EEE 1008HA.
On the right side, there is a headphone jack and 2x USB ports.
There is a SD/MMC card reader too on the front side
Hard disk and RAM
It comes with a mammoth 500GB HDD and 4GB RAM. It should be more than enough for storing all your media on it.
Expandability
It is difficult to upgrade as battery, HDD, RAM and WiFi card as none are directly accessible to the end user. Hard disk is massive and you wontβ be replacing it anytime soon as 500GB is the maximum capacity that one can get for laptops right now. 4GB RAM, also, should be more than enough for anybody.
However, if in case, something goes wrong with the any of these components, the user will be forced to visit the authorized dealer to get these components replaced, which otherwise, could have been replaced by the user himself.
Battery Life
As mentioned above, the battery of the UX30 is built-in. It has a 3-cell 3250mAh battery. Small battery and no built-in optical drive is the reason that it weighs just 1.45kg. It surprised us in battery run times though. While, it kept running for 5 hours in power saving mode. When using it for web-browsing via WiFi, we were able to get just above 3.5 hours which is not bad at all for a notebook with 3-cell battery.
Performance mode dropped the battery runtime to about 3 hours which is still decent.
Operating System and bundled software
As mentioned earlier, the ASUS UX30 comes with Windows Vista Home Premium OS. ASUS is providing free upgrade to the latest Windows 7 Home Premium OS.
ASUS UX30, like the SONY VAIOs, come with lot of pre-loaded utilities. Several of these utilities are actually bloatware utilities which increase the overall start up time by a considerable amount. The HDD kept blinking continuously for nearly 4 minutes after Vista had loaded as it was busy loading myriad of these apps in the background. It is pity that ASUS has not tweaked the Vista OS the way they do on their EEE PCs that come with Windows XP (we are yet to test Windows 7 EEEs though).
I hope Windows 7 to improve this scene as it has faster system startup. Those who wish to stick with Vista should do a fresh install to get rid of junkware.
PROS AND CONS:
(+) Display is flushed with the bezel
(+) Massive hard disk capacity
(+) Ample RAM
(+) Chiclet keyboard is great; has nice tactile feedback
(+) Roomy touchpad; supports multi-touch
(+) Flaps prevent the dust from getting inside the ports
(+) Free Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade
(+) Aluminum lid, great overall finish
(+) Faster than Atom netbooks/notebooks
(+) Slim design
(+) Good built quality
(-) no optical drive
(-) 3-cell battery wonβt last 6 hours or so
(-) no access to battery, RAM, HDD or WiFi card
(-) Flaps protecting the ports can be annoying to some
(-) Lot of bloatware. Clean install recommended
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