Asus UX 30 Laptop [Review]

Home » Reviews » Mobile Computing » Notebooks

Asus UX 30 Laptop [Review]

Rohan Naravane, Dec 18, 2009 1538 hrs IST

Asus's iteration of slim and light

Thin and elegant design, Good build quality, large multi-touch trackpad, 500GB hard disk, HDMI and 3 USB ports

Expensive, No optical drive, slightly under-powered processor, only 3-cell battery

Check specifications
Write Review

Expert Rating :

Expert Review

Build and Design:

The Asus UX 30 has an elegant design; thanks to the smooth metallic top and shiny black body. From the side, its design philosophy seems similar to Asus's Seashell range of Eee PCs. Certain parts of the body (thankfully excluding the top) are more prone to fingerprints, but then this is the case with most laptops these days -- we can do nothing much to help it. It's not the thinnest notebook out there, but thin enough to be carried around anywhere comfortably. At just 1.45 kg, its exactly as light as Asus' early generation 10-inch Eee PCs. The build quality can be deemed as decently sturdy. The screen especially feels sturdy due to the thick top. The lid's hinge offers fair resistance as well.

Opening the lid reveals a few bundles of joy. First is the keyboard that sports an isolated key design. The keys have a consistent shaping and offer decent tactility. The track-pad below is large in size. Such a big surface area comes in handy, especially since it supports multi-touch gestures. You can scroll using two fingers. Another cool functionality is the three finger tap to right-click; thus eliminating the need to stretch your thumb at the bottom to click the button. The gestures worked well and eased working on the laptop. There aren't any gestures to zoom or rotate photographs though. The dot-textured touch-pad got mixed opinions. Personally, I liked it while others found it to be a slight hindrance. Finally, we have a hotkey above the keyboard to switch the power profiles (from high performance to power saving).

The 13.3 inch screen bears a now-standardized 1366x768 pixel resolution. While the display delivered decent viewability, the brightness felt just a notch on the lower side. The web-cam above it belts out a decent quality output.

The ports at the sides have been neatly encased in covers. On the left, we have a mini VGA, HDMI, LAN and one USB port. The mini VGA port can be connected to the provided adapter that converts it into a full VGA (D-Sub) port. A SD/MMC card slot lies right at the beginning of its belly. Two Altec Lansing branded speakers sit on the side. They are pretty loud and emit decent quality sound. Flipping it over, we see that the battery's flushed into the body. It can't be removed just like the Macbook Air. The lack of an optical drive which could be a downer for people still using CD/DVDs on a regular basis. Even if you don't, there will those times when you will miss it.