Always travel ‘light’ with Asus Zenbook UX331

We all need a personal computer or a laptop in our life which is as an important companion as our family member. For busy professionals and those who are on frequent travel it is imperative to own a light laptop and with the advent of technology and new design, an era of light weight laptops has arrived.

Many players like Dell, Acer and Asus have brought light weight premium laptops in the market. The first sight of Asus Zenbook UX331 at a glance is a sleek and handy machine carved in aluminium which gives a premium feel.

Design& Display : The Asus Zenbook is a premium lightweight notebook weighing just less than a kilogram at 985 grams. The 13 inchnotebook can be carried very comfortably in small backpacks as well.

• The 13-inch display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 offers wide view angles and the thin bezel design, gives it an edge-to-edge look.
• Anti-glare properties make it convenient to view even in sunlight and tubelights or LED lights.
• The 13-inch Full HD display is larger than the ones found on Apple’s offering.
• The matte-finished exterior is a shift away from the usual glossy metallic surfaces that are found on ZenBooks and with this model, the attraction of fingerprint residue is greatly diminished.
• The lid is very sturdy with minimum wobble.
• Featuring an all-metallic body, the lid is extremely sturdy and there was minimal wobble observed.
• Asus has conducted battery tests including tough military grade ones and it has survived extreme climatic temperatures.
• It also features ASUS’s NanoEdge display that sports ultra-thin bezels that offer an 80 per cent screen-to-body-ratio.

Keyboard and connectivity: 

The keyboard has been designed very well.

The keys look big and well-spaced, allowing users to type fast without pressing the adjoining keys. They are also backlit which means that one can type in the dark with the same ease as in a well-lit room.

It comes with two full-sized USB-A 3.1 ports, a headphone jack, one Type-C port, a microSD card slot, and a full-sized HDMI port. These ports are significantly more than what its competition offers.

ASUS has used a Chicklet-styled backlit keyboard on the ZenBook 13 and there is anoption to customise the lights depending on the lighting environment the laptopis used in. There is a fair amount of travel between the keys making it extremely comfortable and convenient for working longerperiods. Moving on, the trackpad is great too and it comes with Windows 10gestures. It is smooth and pretty responsive and we did not find any issueswith it.

The entire trackpad surface is a left-click button when pressed upon, except of course the area that’s designated for the right-click. Apart from this, there is the super-responsive fingerprint sensor that’s located below the arrow keys.

Connectivity options include HDMI and USB.

There is no LAN port, however, Asus is bundling a free USB to LAN converter with the notebook.

Performance: The notebook runs on Intel’s 8th gen Core i5 chipset with 8GB RAM and Windows 10 Home OS atop.

It handled most tasks comfortably . The 256 GB SSD isn’t much for users who like to tow away a lot of photos, offline movies and music. However, it ensures the apps and OS will boot up a lot faster than HDD notebooks.

The Asus ZenBook 13 has an amazing hardware. It boasts an 8th Generation Intel Coreprocessor with an option to choose between Intel’s i5 8250U or i7 8550Uprocessors. The latter comes with 8GB of LPDDR32133MHz SDRAM onboard RAM. For storage, it has a 512GB PCI-E Gen3X4SSD here, which is sufficient enough for storing documents, media and otherdata. It is also available in a variety of configurations aimed at differentusers with varying budgets.

As far as the thermal area goes, the laptop remains pretty cool even during continuous usage and the heat management is taken care of well. It does get a bit hotter whilst charging, but it cools off petty quickly as well.

Sound Quality

• The Zenbook notebook comes with 1 Watt of Harman Kardon speakers which give you clear sound clarity.
• During review we had observed that streaming of movies and TV we had clear sound clarity and it was good experience.

Battery

• Asus Zenbook comes with a three cell 50 Watt-hours polymer battery which lasts for an average of 15 hours.
• During review using the laptop continuously we found the battery lasted for about 7 hours on an average.
• This much is good enough to last for day’s work without charging it.

Miscellaneous

• The laptop comes loaded with Windows 10 Home and it also features Modern Standby and Cortana.
• With Modern Standby, you get an instant on, instant off experience, which is similar to a smartphone.
• It also features Wi-Fi 802 AC and Bluetooth v4.2 as connectivity, which is standard.

Verdict: 

• The ZenBook 13 is one of the most ergonomic friendly and thin notebooks which is well priced competitively alongside other brands like Acer and Dell.
• Must for a frequent traveller to carry it easily at all times. 
• Must for a working professional or social media professionals.