ASUS Zenbook (UX21) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 22, 2011 8:00 PM ESTBattery Life
With limited time to test before I board a plane to Nokia World in London I only had time to run through one of our standard PC battery life scripts. I chose the web browsing test which involves frequent opening/closing of web pages until the battery runs out. It's a pretty stressful test that's not just indicative of web browsing but also battery life in general.
As you may have already seen from our UX21 teaser earlier this week, performance here is as expected. The UX21 has a 35Wh integrated (technically non-removable) battery, which just isn't a whole lot of capacity—particularly compared to your more run of the mill 13- and 14-inch notebooks. Battery life is naturally the price you pay for portability and form factor. You're looking at around 4.5 hours of continuous usage on a single charge. Obviously run something more CPU intensive and that number will drop considerably.
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efeman - Saturday, October 22, 2011 - link
So, from what I can gather, it looks like a decent stab at a Windows-based true ultraportable. I'm excited to see the competition over the next few months, as well as what these things will evolve to over time.RussianSensation - Saturday, October 22, 2011 - link
If Asus fixes the track pad issue with firmware updates and does a Revision 2 when Ivy Bridge arrives, while keeping the same prices, this will be a viable competitor to the MacBook Air. It's a nice first stab at the Ultrabook market. However, I feel that when paying $1200-1400 for a 13.3 inch X31 model, the screen should be pretty nice. So I am going to have to skip this model until they fix the screen.DanNeely - Sunday, October 23, 2011 - link
I wouldn't hold my breath on the touchpad. My MSI wind netbook had a Sentilics pad; it was cripled by a few patents synaptics refused to license with anyone else.Friendly0Fire - Sunday, October 23, 2011 - link
Not that it matters much; Synaptics touchpads are also terrible. My Envy's is still barely usable a year after it came out.cloudgazer - Saturday, October 22, 2011 - link
On the battery life performance you have the Zenbook down as being an i5 - presumably that's a typo and was meant to be an i7? Or did you do the battery test on the i5 model? In which case the model number is presumably a typo?Something is squiffy at any rate.
JarredWalton - Saturday, October 22, 2011 - link
Corrected; it's the i7-2677M (there's no such thing as an i5-2677M, though there is an i5-2557M). Thanks.Filiprino - Saturday, October 22, 2011 - link
Now you are releasing 1600x900 thin laptops? GTH.And I can't believe that ASUS still puts b/g/n cards. Where are my 5Ghz frequencies?
vol7ron - Sunday, October 23, 2011 - link
I think Wireless-N (802.11n) uses both 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies.JarredWalton - Sunday, October 23, 2011 - link
802.11n can be 2.4GHz and/or 5GHz, but in this case ASUS used a cheaper chip that is 2.4GHz only. 802.11a/b/g/n usually means 5GHz is supported on 11n, but b/g/n typically means 2.4GHz only.vol7ron - Sunday, October 23, 2011 - link
I'm not sure that would meet N specs, though. You're saying it would operate w/ N, but it would be on a 2.4GHz band, which would more than likely limit the throughput.I think cards that are b/g/n, that only operate on 2.4GHz will still only see a max of 54Mbps, right?