It's tough to begin a review of any Ultrabook without first mentioning the MacBook Air, not least because the Ultrabook spec as originally envisioned by Intel is basically a description of Apple's most portable laptop. The very first Ultrabooks were typically dead ringers for the Air, but in the months since then the Ultrabook tent has widened to the point that the term has become all-but-useless as a descriptor for anything. With the possible exception of Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon—which marries the Ultrabook spec to some of the ThinkPad's own longstanding design signatures—few Ultrabooks have been able to offer a better combination of looks, specs, size, and cost, usually opting to favor one or two of those characteristics to the detriment of the others.
The Asus Zenbook Prime is different. It shares much in common with the MacBook Air—a backlit chiclet keyboard, a large buttonless touchpad, and an all-metal enclosure that sheds the Ethernet port and full-size video outputs in favor of keeping things thin. Where the Prime differs from the Air is in its display, a 1080p IPS affair with great color and fantastic viewing angles that puts the Air's already decent LCD panel to shame. Can this display panel help the Zenbook Prime out-MacBook Air the MacBook Air?
Design and build quality
In its design, the UX31A is broadly similar to the original Zenbook that we reviewed last year: aluminum lid, top case, and bottom case with a plastic bezel. The keys on the older Zenbook were metal in a plastic keyboard tray, but the Zenbook Prime swaps those for plastic keys in a metal tray. The hinge, which is stiff enough to keep the screen from wobbling while in use, is also pliable enough to be lifted without bringing the bottom of the laptop with it.
The UX31A, second from the top of the stack, compared to the MacBook Air (top of the stack), the Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M5 gaming Ultrabook (second from bottom), and my chunky old Dell Latitude E6410 (bottom).
The UX31A's webcam gets the job done for Skyping, but that's about all you'd want to do with it.
The computer's underside is relatively unadorned, sporting only a few Torx screws, rubber feet, and two small speakers. These were generally loud enough to be audible, but their sound is unsurprisingly tinny and their bass is nonexistent. Thankfully, the computer's fan also doesn't get very loud—the Zenbook is pretty quiet at idle, and even when the fan ramps up it's mostly inaudible unless you're in a quiet room. The laptop also stays cool under pressure—it's perfectly comfortable to have this laptop actually sitting on your lap, even if you're playing a game or performing other processor-intensive tasks.
The 1920x1080 matte IPS display is undoubtedly the Prime's strongest point, and it's an oasis in a desert of 1366x768 garbage dumped on the market by every PC maker in existence—other Zenbook Prime models with 1366x768 and 1600x900 panels exist, but if you stick to the UX31A series (and not the UX31E or UX32VD) you can safely avoid both the inferior display and, in the UX32VD's case, the mechanical hard drive.
I have good vision, but even I was straining my eyes a bit to read text at native resolution and scaling. Turning Windows' scaling up to 125 percent or 150 percent should alleviate the issue for most people, and that small bump doesn't introduce quite as many problems as does something like 200% scaling. Scaling or no, it can't be denied that the screen here is head and shoulders above the type of panels usually found in Ultrabooks, and it even beats out the MacBook Air in resolution and viewing angles.
The UX31A's screen viewed from above. It does a great job of retaining its color, and the image is still clear, good news for anyone sitting behind a reclining passenger on an airplane.
Viewed from the side, the UX31A's screen fades a little, but still remains pretty accurate and easy to read.
While I wish I had nothing but unchecked, gushing praise for the Prime's screen, there was one small issue: our review unit had noticeably uneven lighting around the edge of the panel, especially at the bottom. This is really only noticeable when the panel is black or dark, but it's significant enough (and the screen is otherwise excellent enough) that it bears mentioning.
The Zenbook Prime's array of ports is neither particularly impressive nor unimpressive: two USB 3.0 ports, one on either side of the laptop, are joined by a headphone jack and a card reader on the left side of the notebook and a mini VGA and micro HDMI port on the right side. The Zenbook also includes a 100 megabit USB Ethernet adapter, a mini VGA to VGA adapter, and a small brown pouch for the accessories that matches the larger brown bag that carries the laptop itself. The power adapter is a small black square with a swappable plug—the Windows Certificate of Authenticity sticker is also stuck to the adapter so, you know, don't lose it or anything.
On the left side, a USB 3.0 port, headphone jack, and card reader.
The UX31A's hinge is strong enough the keep the screen from wobbling, but not so stiff that it lifts the bottom of the laptop up with it.
On the right side, a power indicator light, the power adapter jack, another USB 3.0 port, the micro HDMI port, and the mini VGA port. Prepare to dongle.
Keyboard and trackpad
Our biggest complaint about the original Zenbook was its trackpad, which we called (among other things) "appalling", "ham-handed", and "less predictable than a teenager." Thankfully, whether through new hardware, new software, or both, the Elantech touchpad on the UX31A is much more predictable with the latest drivers installed.
The UX31A's trackpad is reformed and ready to re-enter society.
The trackpad is one large, smooth square of plastic with a small line at the bottom where a standard trackpad's buttons would be to show users where they can right and left click. Clicking (or tapping) with one finger anywhere else on the surface of the trackpad will left click, and clicking (or tapping) with two fingers will right-click; other gestures like pinch-to-zoom and inertial two-finger scrolling are also enabled and work without any major hitches. While two-finger scrolling, I found that some very small movements that would initiate scrolling on an Apple trackpad would instead right-click on the Zenbook's trackpad—if you're used to an Apple trackpad, you'll just need to learn to make larger movements for scrolling.
Internal specs
There's not much to say about what's on the inside of the UX31A, since it's broadly similar to just about every Ivy Bridge Ultrabook out there: a dual-core processor (a 1.9GHz Core i7-3517U in our review unit, a 1.7GHz Core i5-3317U in the base unit) and Intel's HD 4000 integrated graphics processor drive most of the action—they're very zippy for most productivity tasks, and while the HD 4000 won't be able to play modern games very well at the panel's 1920x1080 resolution, Ivy Bridge's graphics are good enough that you should be able to play most things at lower settings or resolutions.
A 256GB SATA 3.0 solid-state drive from ADATA (a 128GB drive is available in the entry-level version) keeps boot times low and minimizes the time it takes to load applications—it takes about 17 seconds to cold boot Windows 7, and just five or six seconds to boot Windows 8. Dual-band wireless and Bluetooth come courtesy of Intel's Centrino 6235 adapter. Asus doesn't give an absolute battery life number, only saying that the ZenBook Prime gets "25 percent more battery life than other Ultrabooks," but in light-to-moderate usage (Web browsing and word processing, mostly) with the screen at half brightness and the wireless on we got a little over six hours out of the UX31A's battery,roughly comparable to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon and fairly typical for 13-inch Ultrabooks.
Benchmarks
For our tests, we compared the UX31A to Acer's Aspire Timeline Ultra M5-481TG gaming Ultrabook, which we also have in the orbiting HQ for review. The Acer laptop, one of the recommendations fromour back-to-school laptop guide, features a slower 1.7GHz Core i5-3317U processor than our Zenbook review unit, but also includes a dedicated graphics card in the form of NVIDIA's GeForce GT 640M LE. For the GPU benchmarks, we measured the M5's results using both the dedicated card and the integrated card—the switchable graphics on that laptop can be disabled in favor of the same Intel HD 4000 integrated GPU in the Zenbook Prime.
The Core i7's extra speed and cache give it a slight leg-up in all of the CPU benchmarks, though obviously this lead would evaporate if we were using the Core i5-toting base model. The (very) slightly faster version of the HD 4000 in the Zenbook also edged out the version in the Acer laptop, but a comparison to that laptop's midrange GPU shows the kind of boost that you can still get from a decent dedicated graphics chip.
Repairs and upgrades
iFixit gave the UX32VD version of the Zenbook high marks earlier this month when it they tore the machine down—iFixit found a removable battery, one usable RAM slot, and an upgradeable standard hard drive. The UX31A Zenbook makes fewer such concessions to repairability.
Removing the ten Torx screws from the bottom of the case is easy enough, and the laptop's battery (which is held in by three Philips head screws) and half-height mini-PCI Express wireless card are both easy enough to remove and replace, but like the MacBook Air and Retina MacBook Pro, the UX31A's RAM is soldered to its motherboard, and its solid-state drive is a very Apple-like drive which is shaped like a pack of gum—it's the long silver rectangle in the photo above.
The Zenbook Prime is generally specced well enough that this lack of upgradability isn't a huge problem, but Asus offers no version of the laptop with more than 4GB of RAM. This is going to be fine in many cases, at least for now, but people with more demanding, RAM-hungry workloads may need to wait for a version that packs more gigabytes in the memory department.
Bundled software and Windows 8 experience
Most of Asus' bundled software can safely be ignored—the most notable programs are a couple of desktop widgets, one of which estimates the amount of standby time remaining (which also lets you choose whether the computer sleeps or hibernates with its lid closed) and another that switches between "high performance" and "power saving" power presets; a LiveUpdate program that keeps the system's drivers and bundled utilities up-to-date; a utility called SecureDelete that promises to delete files securely; and a feature called FaceLogon that adds facial recognition technology to the login screen. My experience with FaceLogon was a bit mixed—I wasn't able to get it to respond to any still pictures of my ugly mug, which is good, but it did have some trouble detecting my face when the lighting conditions and angles were different from those in the initial picture I took to set the feature up.
The other usual suspects are all here. Dangerously outdated versions of Flash and Adobe Reader, an old version of Google Chrome, a copy of Office 2010 Starter Edition that can be unlocked to the full version of Office with a product key, and Windows Live Essentials 2011 round out the package.
As for the Zenbook Prime's performance with the forthcoming Windows 8, as a modern Ivy Bridge laptop with an SSD, it has absolutely no problem running the operating system smoothly, and Windows 8's bright colors look great on its screen. Windows 8's improved startup times enable the UX31A to cold boot in just five or six seconds, which is also very impressive. Driver support for all of the system's major components—graphics, chipset, audio, networking, and the rest—is all present and accounted for. The Prime also features UEFI support—the version of Windows 7 that ships on it already boots using UEFI—which opens the door to supporting the Secure Boot feature if Asus sees fit to issue a BIOS update that enables it.
The laptop does lack touchscreen capabilities, which may hurt it in the event that touch-optimized Metro apps become the norm over Windows 8's life cycle, and its multitouch trackpad doesn't yet have the driver support it needs to support some of the trackpad gestures baked into the RTM version of the operating system. With appropriate driver support, users should be able to invoke the Charms menu, switch between running applications, and others, but even the Windows 8 trackpad driver from Asus' support site (which does, admittedly, pre-date the RTM version of Windows 8) doesn't yet support the gestures.
Conclusions
The Zenbook Prime is an attractive, well-built Ultrabook with a really great screen and pretty good "everything else." The sheer number of terrible 1366x768 displays on the market makes the screen difficult to overemphasize—in a world where a $200 tablet can sport better color and viewing angles than a $1000 laptop, screens like the UX31A's are a breath of fresh air, minor imperfections and all. Everything else about the UX31A meets the standards set by the MacBook Air (except, sadly, the 4GB RAM ceiling), but the screen is one of the all-too-rare instances where one of the PC OEMs beat Apple at its own game.
The good
- 1920x1080 matte IPS display with excellent color and viewing angles
- Solid construction
- Great keyboard with a trackpad that has largely made up for the previous Zenbook's sins
- Good performance thanks to Ivy Bridge and the included SATA 3.0 SSD
The bad
- Speaker isn't very loud and sounds pretty tinny
- Bloatware, of course
- Our review unit had some issues with uneven lighting around the edge of the screen
The ugly
- Capped at 4GB of RAM, which is OK for now but may be a limiting factor in the future
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