Asus 13.3" Full HD Core i5 Zenbook Touch Price: $699.99 Shipping Options: $5 Standard Shipping Estimates: Ships in 3-5 business days (Thursday, Feb 13 to Tuesday, Feb 18) + transit Condition: Factory Reconditioned
I own a slightly different model of current-gen Asus Zenbook, but the exterior is pretty much identical to this one. A few thoughts:
It’s probably one of the nicest looking computers you can buy today anywhere.
It’s solidly built. The case is all aluminum and glass, no plastic parts here. This is a computer that will hold up for years if you treat it delicately.
Both the front and back of the lid are scratch-proof gorilla glass, and the ASUS logo illuminates.
The keyboard is a pleasure to use, and the ceramic-coated oversized trackpad works flawlessly.
It never gets hot, and the ventilation is very well-designed and well-placed. The only exhaust ports are around where the chassis and monitor hinge, so it doesn’t blow out either side onto you. It’s absolutely silent most of the time.
The touch screen is flawless, bright and vibrant. But I may have a better panel than this model for sale; mine’s the 2560x1440 (in the same 13.3").
The speakers are awesome. The best I’ve had in any laptop this thin. You can really put a TV show or movie on and enjoy it from the sofa without straining to hear. Dell and HP have been cheaping out on their ultrabook speakers, ASUS has not.
ASUS doesn’t really bundle lots of crapware you’ll need to uninstall. It’ll run well out of the box.
Thanks to the Haswell processor and latest battery tech, you’ll probably get 6-8 hours of runtime without having to turn the brightness down to 0. One charge will also supposedly last 250 days at sleep (not hibernate!), though I haven’t had the patience to test that
I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this to someone looking for a great computer in this price range.
The only way you get a better computer in a touchscreen ultrabook form-factor is to spend a lot more. You can get an i7, 8GB RAM, higher DPI screen and better GPU with the same build quality either in an Asus UX301LA, or a Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus, but they’ll run you closer to $1800.
P.S. The included faux-leather sleeve is lined in something like felt on the inside, which serves as not only padding but helps wipe fingerprints off the glass lid. It has a magnetic closure built-in. It’s really nice and the only free sleeve I’ve ever kept. It’d be a great bonus if the refurbs come with the sleeve.
Seems to be a pretty darn good price for a haswell ultrabook. If this were the super high resolution screen I’d jump on it, but if you are fine with 1080p, this would be great.
Anyone interested in this notebook, see the review in this post!
I own a 4th gen I7 ASUS ROG 18" laptop and can attest to Asus’ build quality, it’s top-notch! I originally considered buying a Zenbook for everything but my CAD work but eventually decided to get an Asus machine that could handle everything. I taught solid modeling software for many years and had a chance to try all the keyboards my students would bring to class and, because so much of my day both then and now are spent typing, quite frankly, the love of the keyboard was the feature that initially drew me to the Asus brand. Though the tactile response of the Asus keyboard always gets high marks from reviewers. Cooling of components is crucial and is an area where Asus dominates. The Asus ventilation and ducting technology keeps components cooler than any system tested and the exhaust is directed away from the user.
I went to my notebook review bible, “notebookcheck.net”, and found this UX302LA Zenbook Review! This is a review for the UX302LA, though there may be some minor feature differences from the “exact” model shown. They give it a rating of 85% which, even though it may not sound like it, once you get to know this site’s rating system you will realize it’s a good score. However, their database is so deep that, if someone takes more time than I did, they may find a closer match for the “exact” model being sold here.
I know my comments aren’t specifically about this Zenbook, but as a brand, I obviously feel the build quality and design of Asus products, and the Zenbook specifically, are excellent and Asus always seems to get high marks for performance. After using my Asus, and from all my experience using others, I doubt anyone would regret buying this Zenbook!
I have a UX31 also with the 1080 screen. It is absolutely amazing for it’s size and I get nothing but comments as to what it is and how cool looking it is. I like that it’s super light weight and built like a tank.
I would only hope that this much newer model carries the same awesome quality as my older one.
[QUOTE=Corrosive, post:6, topic:410578]
Seems to be a pretty darn good price for a haswell ultrabook. If this were the super high resolution screen I’d jump on it, but if you are fine with 1080p, this would be great.
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13" at 1080 is pretty small, you DO NOT want any higher resolution with this size screen. Everything is very small on my screen, but razor sharp. I opted for this originally because I wanted to do a lot of photo editing on this tiny computer, but realized that even though I had plenty of real estate on the screen, I couldn’t see what I was editing very well. I ended up using my work 15.6" laptop (also wth 1080 screen) for photo work instead and now I just use this one for traveling with and doing anything else when I’m not at home. If you went with any higher resolution on the small screen, you would need to break out the reading glasses.
I got the previous generation all-black zenbook model from here on woot and I love it. Dead sexy and I could use its sharp wedge shape to kill zombies in the apocalypse.
I will say that I had to send it to ASUS within the 90-day ASUS warranty. Hard drive died - odd since it was an SSD - and the tech support was fine to deal with over the phone. It was out for about a week and a half before I got it back. No big deal as this is a secondary computer for me.
All of that said, I still recommend it a lot. I would love to merge this one with mine and get a best of both product. I love that this is the latest generation of Intel (4th Gen aka Haswell) which will get you great battery life with excellent performance and that it has a full size HDMI port (mine has a micro-hdmi). However, I personally prefer the all metal design and I love that the model I got is all black.
Personally, I am happier with mine as it is entirely an SSD, but for those who need more than 90 GBs of local storage this is one of your best bets!
Beware. I purchased one of these from Woot on Dec 12, 2013 and am still going back and forth with Asus to repair the keyboard and mouse pad that was not refurbished properly (non-working keys, non working left mouse button). Woot has abdicated the service completely and is not helpful at all. If you purchase, beware that you are on your own!
All the things folks typically mention as shortcomings on the $350-500 Woot laptops are covered here! And you do pay for those features, but this $699 factory refurb looks like a nice deal compared to the current $899 sale price new at BestBuy (“Regular $999”):
I’ve been wanting one of these for a while. I used to be a die hard Thinkpad fan (hell, I’m typing on one right now), but they got got bulkier (even the vaunted “S” variants) and stuck with the same middling pixel density. Oh sure there’s the X1 Carbon (and the Yoga 13), but way more expensive and 67% the screen resolution of comparable Asus models.
So for my money (which I barely have), the Zenbook is one of the best deals on the market today-- even without this ridiculously low price for the most recent Zenbook release-- which this is (the other being the UX301LA).
If you are on the fence about this purchase, may I urge you to consider strongly pulling the trigger here. The only alternative in my enthusiast mind are AMD’s just released Kaveri (for gaming purposes) or Microsoft’s Surface Pro 2 (who ever thought that a Microsoft product would be a rebel’s choice?)
13" at 1080 is pretty small, you DO NOT want any higher resolution with this size screen. Everything is very small on my screen, but razor sharp. I opted for this originally because I wanted to do a lot of photo editing on this tiny computer, but realized that even though I had plenty of real estate on the screen, I couldn’t see what I was editing very well. I ended up using my work 15.6" laptop (also wth 1080 screen) for photo work instead and now I just use this one for traveling with and doing anything else when I’m not at home. If you went with any higher resolution on the small screen, you would need to break out the reading glasses.
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This is what notebook check.net says re: the UX302LA’s resolution. “Asus picks a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels for the UX302LA. This is lower than the resolution of the UX301LA: 2560x1440 pixels. However, whether or not such a high resolution is truly advantageous remains unanswered. Currently, many programs do not scale properly, which leaves the captions very small in Full HD which is quite troublesome.” So they agree with you.
[QUOTE=clanecks, post:11, topic:410578]
Yep. The touchpad alone was the reason I returned mine. Asus and touchpad are like archenemies.
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Asus must have received a lot of feedback like yours because the touchpad on my Asus GX750, one of Asus’ newest models, has the best rated touchpad among it’s competitors. “Notebookcheck.net” found it to be larger, have even sensitivity in all quadrants and positive feedback on both the left & right click buttons. And, prior to my disabling my touchpad via F9 function key, it really worked well with multi-gesture input and the buttons responded and felt excellent. So it seems Asus has resolved their touchpad issues.
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