Asus Zenbook UX310UA
UX310UA 0UA Smarter than the averagege laptop
Tolstoy said all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappypy in its own way. He may as well have beeneen talking about laptops. We all agree on the ideal: slim, light and sturdy, with a solid keyboard, responsive trackpad, sharprp screen and plenty of processing power.wer. Sadly, not many of us can afford all that. Once you start shaving off features to make the price more realistic, though,ugh, any number of things can go wrong.g.
Asus has a record of making sensible compromises. This Windows 10 model fills an existing chassis with some new components, including Intel’s latest Kaby Lake i5-7200u processor. The plain silver aluminium case looks classy, although on closer inspection it feels a little plasticky and less robust than you might hope. Weighing 1.4kg despite its modestly sized 13.3in screen, it’s not the most portable laptop and, at 18.4mm thick, it doesn’t taper off much at the front either. HP’S Spectre 13, for example, is half as thick, but then it costs around twice as much. On the plus side, you get a full set of ports, with USB Type-c doubling as the power input, and even an SD card reader.
Opening the Zenbook, we found a very pleasing keyboard and trackpad. The latter has the smooth surface and quick response we look for these days and is broad enough not to feel cramped, while the keyboard has large, well-spaced keys that offer plenty of travel. There was a little flex and bounce while typing, but not enough to put us off. It’s backlit, too – a useful feature that’s all too often omitted even from pricier laptops.
The screen is even better. Did we say compromise? Asus has given the UX310UA a HIDPI 3200x1800-pixel display similarlar to the one we saw in the pricier UX330UA (see review in Issue 485) – a luxury usually reserved for much more expensive systems. Using Windows 10’s scaling options, you can fit on the screen as much of your work as you can comfortably see, and everything (except in a few programs that haven’t been updated recently) looks pin-sharp.
Colour accuracy, at 86 per cent of the SRGB range, isn’t quite good enough to satisfy serious photo editors, which is a shame. It’s more than adequate for everyday use, however, and the screen even has an anti-glare matt coating, so you won’t be bothered by reflections. The only drawback is that the hinge doesn’t open particularly far, so if you’re working with the Zenbook on your lap, you may end up with a less-than-ideal viewing angle.
Inside the UX310UA, the i5-7200u processor, paired with 8GB of memory, produced a strong performance in our tests. These lower-power mobile processors never stand up to comparisons with desktop i5 PCS, and for heavy work such as 4K video production you’d want more power, especially because there’s no dedicated graphics card to help out. That also means gamers will need to turn the graphics quality settings way down to run demanding 3D titles, and playing games at the screen’s full resolution isn’t really an option. But again, for everything most people want to do in Windows, it’s absolutely fine.
A 256GB SSD is fitted as standard, while a 512GB option costs an extra £150. This may mean you need to keep large file collections on an external drive, but compared with a bigger, slower mechanical hard drive, the SSD keeps everything moving briskly. At six hours and 45 minutes in our video playback test, battery life was as good as we’d expect in this price bracket.
VERDICT: This may not be the most beautifully engineered laptop, but it’s hard to think of one that spends your money more wisely
★★★★★
ALTERNATIVE: Dell XPS 13 £1,149 Dell’s Infinity Edge screenreen makes this laptop more compact, but it’s pricier even before you add £150 foror high resolution
For everything most people want to do in Windows, it’s absolutely fine
VERDICT: Except for the absence of buttons, we can barely fault this ereader; only Kindle’s dominance would make us think twice
★★★★☆
ALTERNATIVE: Amazon Kindle Paperwhite £110 If you want to buy books in Kindle format, this is a decentt reader with a backlight, but it’s not waterproof