Well to start off I need to say that it's a windows laptop. That means it comes with all the pros and cons of windows and the unfortunate downsides of having multiple OEMs and one generalized operating system.
Appearance and build- The laptop build quality is top notch. Fit and and finish are spectacular; nothing creaks, nothing has gaps, etc. The gorilla glass on both the outside and inside are great, but highly reflective and prone to smudging and pick up fingerprints like the plague. The ceramic inlay surrounding the keyboard and touchpad feels fantastic, it's absurdly silky and soft to the touch, while carrying the durability of ceramic (which is harder than steel). And of course, it's absurdly light and thin. The edges are a bit sharp, but overall, the combination of the glass and the thinness of the laptop make for a stunning unit.
Screen- The IGZO screen is perhaps the most flawed part of this laptop. It's extremely bright, but the black levels are just ok. Other reviews have cited very high contrast and great black levels, but I don't see it. Also, out of the box, the calibration is abysmal. The colors are heavily skewed towards blueish tones and the gamma and contrast are terrible. Even worse, this took me a while to find out, the ASUS Splendid program messes with the screen, leaving details in dark images and scenes unviewable. Other than that, the screen is bright and vibrant and the touchscreen works like a charm (though I did have problems with the system forgetting the touchscreen for a while, used diagnose hardware problems to fix it. Viewing angles are ok. They're in between IPS and TN and will wash out after certain angles. I believe the type of panel is PPS. The dell XPS 15 and Razer Blade use similar IGZO PPS screens and suffer from this as well.
Speakers and headphone output- The speakers are quite good for an ultrabook. They don't sound as tinny as most and can get quite loud. I found that the audiowizard preset that worked the best was Gaming, but feel free to find which one suits your fancy. I turn the audio enhancements off when I plug in headphones though. I have UE500 earbuds which are about twice as hard to drive as most normal earbuds and this laptop can just barely power them enough to reach satisfactory volume levels. You might need to normalize the audio in windows settings if this is an issue for you. Also, for videos, similarly normalize the audio, especially when you're dealing with DTS and AC3 audio. Otherwise you'll barely be able to hear anything. On the plus side, I notice no hiss when I plug my earbuds in, something that tends to occur on most mobile devices.
Keyboard and touchpad- Not much to say, it's a fantastic keyboard for an ultrabook and easy to type on. Key layout is sensible and no keys that don't deserve shrinking have been shrunk. The power button is incorporated into the keyboard and is placed next to the delete key, something i initially found concerning, but I have yet to hit the power button by accident once. Unfortunately, I did receive a unit with a loose enter key; it was only half attached on the right side. After fiddling around with it for a while, I managed to fix it. The keys are also backlit, but lack the cleaner individual LED lit keys of other laptops like the macbooks, something that while isn't very annoying (it's a keyboard that lights up... can't really go wrong) is an oversight of sorts on a laptop this expensive. Because of this, there is light haloing around the keys. There are four settings for the keyboard backlight; off, low, medium, and high. Having the ability to adjust this is very useful.
The touchpad is also fantastic, it's a glass touchpad and silky smooth. It clicks well (could be a bit easier to click, found my finger hurting from pressing it after a day of heavy use) and tracks well. Gestures work well and accurately. Only issue is with the ASUS Smart Gesture drivers, they have a well-known issue of overriding CPU settings and setting the minimum processor state to 100%, killing battery life.
Performance- Performance is top notch; the SSDs blaze through anything you throw at them and the CPU is the most powerful ultrabook processor out there, though this comes at a cost of higher power usage and TDP (28w vs 15w). You can do some light gaming with the Iris 5100 graphics as well, which far exceed the Intel 4400 graphics most ultrabooks pack. The cpu also heavily outperforms the i5-4200U CPU that nearly every ultrabook packs nowadays, and the i5-4500U as well. Also, the 8gb of DDR3L ram provides ample memory for any use. Boot times are fantastic, around 10 seconds to start up and login. Resuming from sleep or hibernation (it's called instanton) is also extremely fast, anywhere from 5-10 seconds. I'm quite satisfied with the performance and have yet to run into a single thing that this laptop can't handle
Battery Life- One word: disappointing. They put a fairly decent sized battery (50wh) in the laptop, which is pretty astonishing considering its size. But even so, it can't handle all the power sucking components. The i7-4558U has a much higher TDP and power consumption than any other Ultrabook processor due to the Iris 5100 graphics. Also, the high resolution screen and it's very high brightness burn through battery absurdly fast. Even on power saver, I rarely hit 5 or more hours of battery life browsing the internet using Firefox at about 30% brightness, on power saver. Usually I get 3.5-4 hours. For a $2000 dollar laptop, this is pretty disappointing and resembles Ivy Bridge battery life, not Haswell. The retina macbook pro 13 packs the same processor and a slightly higher resolution screen and exceeds the battery life on this by about 3 hours with only about a 0.2 lb increase in weight. Also, something that's not this laptop's fault, but video playback power usage is mediocre. Unfortunately, this is a problem with Haswell itself, not the laptop.
Thermals and noise- This thing can run pretty hot. Highest I've seen it hit is around 68C which isn't too bad though. It vents the heat onto the screen but the upper bottom half of the laptop also heats up. It never gets hot enough to burn you, but it can get annoyingly hot. You can select passive cooling from the power options on the laptop, which will prevent the fans from spinning up immediately, and in the case of using the power saver profile, never, making the laptop completely silent. The fans on this thing are quiet as well, and without a hard disk drive, there's no drive spinning noise as well, something appreciable coming from an Envy 14 from 2011.
Connectivity- Well it's not great but it's as expected. I originally had the UX302LA and this was given to me as a replacement because I sent in the original and all replacements of the UX302LA and UX302LG were out of stock. Those two laptops have 3 USB ports and a full HDMI port instead of the other comparable ports the UX301LA has due to their thicker bodies. And one of the USB ports on both can output 2W, charging your devices at wall outlet speeds. This only has two USB ports, one audio port, one micro-HDMI, one mini-displayport, and one SD card slot (which leaves half the card hanging out.) Adding on to this, there is a 720p webcam that's mediocre. It works but don't expect anything amazing. Thankfully, ASUS includes a USB to Ethernet dongle and a mini-displayport to VGA dongle in a small pouch, as well as a sleeve to carry the laptop in. This goes above and beyond the normal accessories most manufacturers give and are genuinely thoughtful (Apple charges around 30+ dollars for EACH of those dongles).
Flaws- Well the problem with the laptop is something that tends to be endemic to all Windows laptops. They come with too much bloatware, and since they're created from parts from tons of different companies, driver and software issues are omnipresent. The ASUS drivers and software on this laptop are highly flawed. They ruin your battery life and screen, and more. Furthermore, something that ASUS definitely should've done with a laptop this expensive is at least give it a decent calibration. Apple is the only manufacturer of both computers and mobile devices that calibrates their devices. ASUS's calibration on here is complete crap. It's actually painful to view because of the harsh blue tone and the terrible black detail. And the availability of only two usb ports almost necessitates a USB hub (imagine plugging in a mouse receiver and keyboard receiver. Short of using a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, or using logitech's unifying receiver to use one receiver for both, you're already out of USB ports.)
A short getting started guide- Trust me, you need this. First things first, uninstall whatever bloatware you want. I uninstalled nearly everything, including Symantec, Wild Tangent, the random ASUS apps, etc. But most importantly, uninstall ASUS Smart Gestures, Power4Gear and ASUS Splendid. For the former, you can technically leave the the smart gestures driver and follow this guide http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/741039-lower-zenbook-power-consumption-due-asus-smart-gesture.html but I opted to install the generic ASUS elan touchpad drivers. There's not much difference other than the three finger app switcher gesture and being unable to scroll down into the apps in the windows start screen and some other minor things. I followed this guide (don't follow the step where you uninstall the ASUS ATK package; it'll turn off your keyboard back lighting and functions.) http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/750227-psa-howto-make-ux301la-touchpad-drivers-more-awesome.html Power4Gear is annoying and useless and changes your power profile without your consent, hence why I deleted it. After this, go to advanced power options and turn off adaptive brightness, I find it overly aggresive and annoying. Then, go to intel graphics properties and then display, then color and change the brightness to 10, contrast to 44, and gamma to 0.9. These are the settings I found best, but feel free to play around. Then go to windows display calibration and follow the steps there. You'll have a more accurate screen that can actually display details in dark images and videos afterwards. If you have a colorimeter or know a better way to calibrate screens, please feel to go ahead and maybe upload your calibration profile? And finally, for some reason ASUS chose to divide the hard drive into two partitions, a data and OS partition. Go to disk management, delete the D (data) partition, and then right click the OS partition and extend the partition. After that, you'll just have one large partition containing your operating system and some tiny partitions that contain recovery data. After all these tweaks, you should have a much more usable laptop.
However, this doesn't solve the issues of display scaling. 1920x1080p is the sweet spot for laptops right now and avoids most of the display scaling issues. This however, does not. Scaling issues are prevalent throughout usage, things are either tiny and cramped and unusable (or close to it), or blurry because they fail to recognize the screens real resolution (the display scaling tricks it into a lower resolution, with two times scaling it thinks its a 1280x720 screen and scales accordingly). Unfortunately for this, we need to wait for developers to take advantage of Windows 8.1's scaling options.
A final word- It annoys me that windows laptops still have all these problems. No laptop maker can tune their touchpads to be as usable and accurate as Apples, they all fail to calibrate their screens, and they have many driver issues. I read an article once written by a self-professed apple fanboy that was shockingly unbiased and to the point- He buys apple products because they simply work. Rather than spend hours like I have to find ersatz solutions that make the laptop 90% workable, macs simply work without these issues. This holds true to android as well. I dislike OSX and grew up around windows pcs, so I'll probably never switch, but this issue annoys me so much and has seen little resolution over the years. Touchpads have gotten much better and are almost universally glass, compared to the crappy plastic ones of days past, and screens have massively improved over the past two years (hopefully crappy TN panel 1366x768 screens will be a thing of the past soon; they overstayed their welcome for far too long and PC manufacturers gypped consumers with them for too long), but these Windows issues are still here and sadly, might always be.
However, since we're talking about Windows, I found many of the complaints of Windows to be unfounded. They seem to be general complaints from people who refuse change in all its forms, good and bad. Some of these people even still use XP. Windows 8 is snappy and modernized with many great new features. I love that you can refresh and reset the PC at any time without a disc and that they improved almost every aspect of the system. The tiles and apps I don't find all that useful, especially since I'm using a laptop, not a tablet, but at least I have the option of using the touchscreen to navigate because of them, something that's not possible on Windows 7 (or very difficult). Yes there's a big learning curve, but afterwards, you'll find it quite easy to use. Performance on Windows 8 is better than 7 and things are always snappy. And for those that complain about the start menu, you have a search option in the charm bar that works great. Or you have a more traditional apps list as well. And with all the different keyboard shortcuts, navigation becomes easy. I find myself liking Windows 8 more and more despite my initial reservations.
Anyways, if it sounds like my view on my laptop is negative, it's really not. Most of these issues are endemic to all Windows laptops and I've long grown used to them. And every computer takes a bit of fiddling around before it suits your tastes. In truth, despite its flaws, this is one of the best laptops I've ever had, and certainly the best I've ever owned. I'm highly satisfied with it and love it despite its flaws because of its many strengths.
In any case, I hope this article helped some of you guys out and that you don't have to deal with all the fiddling around I had to do. And hey, in the end, we still have a fantastic ultrabook despite all its flaws.
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