13-inch laptops are getting thinner and thinner, blurring the line between regular laptops and ultrabooks. In addition, manufacturers manage to equip them with more and more advanced components.
Asus ZenBook UX305 is the perfect response of a well-known manufacturer to this trend. With a price of about 700 dollars in the USA and Europe and 70 thousand rubles. at the time of the start of sales in Russia, it is cheaper than most premium ultrabooks, but it is not inferior to them either in assembly quality or in specifications. The perfect balance between cost and performance is what the Asus ZenBook UX305 says. The review will tell about its technical data and customer reviews, and you can decide for yourself whether this is so.
Design
Notebook Asus ZenBook UX305 is easy to confuse with a notebook. It is surprisingly thin and light - 1.27 cm thick and weighing 1.17 kg, body size - 35.5 by 22.6 cm. This exceeds the performance of even the latest 13-inch MacBook Air, which sets the tone in the design of ultrabooks. Moreover, the decrease in thickness came without compromising the number of available ports.
Despite the fact that the device is thin and compact, it does not seem fragile. The whole body is made of aluminum. On the inner surface it has a nice embossed texture, and on the side of the lid it is decorated with a strict radial pattern, applied by laser engraving.
At first, the laptop was released in a dark color, which changed depending on the lighting - from silver to dark gray with a purple tint. But soon he had “relatives” - a white and golden model.
Out of the box, the notebook is “decorated” with colorful stickers and a small inscription under the keyboard, which refers to the manufacturer of the speakers. All this can be removed without a trace.
Despite its modest size, the keyboard does not look compressed. There are full-fledged Space and Enter buttons on it. The keys are clearly separated from each other and pleasantly pressed.
The one-piece touchpad occupies about a third of the width of the laptop, so it is large enough for convenient use. In addition, his sensitivity and gesture recognition work flawlessly, he does not confuse the right / left click, correctly flips and enlarges objects.
In general, the design almost exactly repeats the MacBook Air, up to a small overlap of the top cover above the hinges, which lifts a part of the case with the keyboard. The most significant difference is the rounded edges and a different color.
Important details
Despite the very small thickness of the case, you will find 3 high-speed USB 3.0 ports, a card reader, a headphone / microphone jack, and a power cord jack, of course. But the standard network cable has nowhere to connect. But the manufacturer offers a simple and elegant solution - a USB-Ethernet adapter is standard.
The laptop also has a mini-HDMI connector, which is much less common than the standard one. But to acquire the appropriate adapter is also not difficult.
Wireless connections are not disregarded - Wi-Fi and Bluetooth version 4.0. help you stay connected in different situations.
A 1.2 megapixel webcam can shoot 720p video in HD quality. But in fact, the result is not very impressive due to the mediocre white balance.
"Filling"
The Asus ZenBook UX305 features more than impressive for its size and price range:
- Dual-core processor Intel Core M model 5Y10, the frequency can vary from 800 MHz to 2 GHz. Do not be confused by this strange indicator, for example, the laptop works fine and does not freeze when playing video in HD quality, with 10 tabs open in Google Chrome.
- Graphics Card HD Graphics 5300.
- 8 GB RAM
- 256 GB hard drive (Asus ZenBook UX305 comes with a 128 GB hard drive in the UK).
All this gives the user the necessary capabilities to solve most everyday tasks. But this model is not suitable for modern games, although it would be strange to expect this from an ultra-thin laptop.
Software
Asus ZenBook UX305 is sold with Windows 8.1., With the ability to upgrade to version 10. In addition, you will find many pre-installed applications, some of which can be removed immediately, because they do nothing without buying a paid version, and some, especially utilities from the manufacturer, can come in handy in future work.
An interesting feature of the Asus ZenBook UX305
With a fanless cooling system, the manufacturer managed to kill not even two, but three birds with one stone:
- eliminate noise and vibration from the fan;
- facilitate the care of the laptop, because there is no constant need to clean the cooler from dust;
- make the case thin and solid.
These are nice bonuses for the user, but how does the system work?
During active work, the processor can heat up to a temperature of more than 80 degrees Celsius, which is bad for the durability of the system components, and there is also significant heating of the case - a little more than 50 degrees during intensive work.
But throttling (reducing the frequency of the processor in order to cool it) is turned on quite rarely.
Display and speakers
The Asus ZenBook UX305 business laptop boasts a bright, matte finish screen with a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. You can work with it in the sunlight, it does not glare at all, the colors are clear and vibrant, even dark gray is easily distinguishable from black due to the high level of contrast. Therefore, watching videos on a small screen with a size of 13.3 inches becomes a real pleasure.
But the built-in speakers leave much to be desired. You can find them at the side ends of the case, they are quiet, and even with a slight increase in volume, they begin to distort the sound. So stock up on good headphones for total comfort.
Battery
Ultra-thin and light laptops are designed for frequent movement of their owner. A key role in determining their level of portability is played by the battery life.
The Asus ZenBook UX305 has a 45 Wh lithium-polymer battery, which, according to the manufacturer's promise, should provide up to 10 hours of using the laptop without recharging.
In reality, this figure is 5-6 hours of active work. The processor and high-resolution display do not spare the battery. With a less intense load, you can expect another 2 hours of charge. Of course, few people use a laptop without an outlet all day, but even larger laptops with powerful processors such as the Dell XPS 13 or Lenovo ThinkPad X1 have a longer battery life.
This is one of the drawbacks of a thin case - a strong battery simply could not fit there.
In addition, working with a laptop, after the charge level drops to 10%, becomes extremely uncomfortable. Processor performance drops to its minimum, and not only video, but even editing a document in Word leads to freezes.
Customer opinion
Asus ZenBook UX305 reviews are mostly positive.
Users praise the high performance of the laptop. Not only office programs, but also numerous sites with Java elements open in the browser (up to 20 tabs), online movie watching, even photo processing in Photoshop do not slow down the device. Of course, video editing, 3D-modeling, gaming innovations exceed the capabilities of the UX305, but it is unlikely that the buyer gets a 13-inch ultrabook for these purposes.
Build quality is pleasantly surprising, the design is thought out to the smallest detail. The laptop is lightweight, compact and strikingly quiet. Customers estimate the battery life at 6 hours with the inclusion of energy-saving settings and lower screen brightness.
Negative moments were:
- the location of the power button directly on the keyboard, to the right of the Backspace key, in place of Delete in the standard layout - some users accidentally hit it;
- the protruding part of the cover lifts the laptop case in a fully open position, while it rises from the rear rubberized legs and the cover may scratch the work surface;
- there is no keyboard backlight, which is inconvenient on trips or for students living in a dormitory;
- Customers are sometimes worried about excessive heating of the case during quite laborious tasks, such as video conferencing in Skype via Wi-Fi.
To summarize
This is not to say that the Asus UX305 laptop is a revolutionary model with advanced features. But this is a product that offers maximum performance and quality at a reasonable price. The last point distinguishes it among competitors especially favorably. Excellent design, good battery, fast operation and excellent display - all this led to the well-deserved popularity of the model. Perhaps in a laptop of this price category it would be nice to see a backlit keyboard, a webcam that shoots in higher quality and a touchscreen, but the manufacturer sacrificed them for the total cost, thereby designating a different target audience for their product.