ASUS U35Jc: Jogging in Place

The More Things Change...

...the more they stay the same. The ASUS U35Jc seems to be in many ways a series of trade-offs with the U30Jc, and that's disappointing because it really should have just been an improvement. The U35Jc sports a slightly faster processor, sheds a pound of weight thanks to ditching the optical drive, has a slimmer body, and marginally improved backlighting on the screen. Unfortunately, it also boasts a lower battery life and a mobile GPU with a lower memory speed on an already overworked 64-bit bus. If you opt to enable the ASUS "Super Hybrid Engine" which locks the processor speed at a pretty low setting, you can probably mitigate the battery issue somewhat, but we didn't need that on the U30Jc to post better numbers.

Taken on its own, the U35Jc can be pretty tempting. The keyboard is comfortable and sensible, and the brushed aluminum cover is both attractive and functional. Build quality is solid, and frankly the machine is damn light. You get excellent battery life—nearly six hours surfing the internet—and the performance is there to do just about anything you want with it. ASUS achieves what they set out to: build an ultraportable with good performance and good battery life without tipping the scales.

The problem is that the U35Jc can't be taken on its own. Notebooks aren't designed in a vacuum, and seeing gripes we had with the U30Jc go largely unanswered in the U35Jc results in the same kinds of issues Jarred brought up recently in his review of the ASUS N82Jv: it's hard to recommend something when it seems like the company is just standing still. ASUS took the optical drive out of the U30Jc, moved a couple things around, and called it a new model. Alternately, they took the slimmer U35Jc, and then stripped off the bamboo, USB3, and WiDi. Either way, that's not what progress looks like.

As a result, the only copelling reason to choose the U35Jc over the U30Jc is if the extra pound and slightly larger size of the U30Jc are a huge deal to you. For about the same money, you lose a negligible 133 MHz on the processor and gain an optical drive (an optical drive that ASUS turns off while running on the battery anyhow). The U35Jc is more of the same at a time when we were already fairly happy with what they produced. It's a product that retains the nagging issues of its predecessor and in many ways offers less. Is it a bad laptop? Certainly not; it's a decent laptop but next time we want to see some real improvement.

What we'd like to see is the U30Jc and/or U35Jc, with an improved LCD, USB 3.0, and a GeForce GT 415M. $900 to $1000 for such a system would be more than acceptable, because LCD quality really does matter. The U35Jc is fairly priced at $800, with good build quality and reasonable performance. It's just that it should have launched simultaneously with the U30Jc and left the decision of size/weight and the optical drive up to the user six months ago. Today, it's 95% the same as its predecessor, only six months late (five months since the laptop first started shipping).