Design and features
Asus' slim, 13-inch laptop does quite a few things right. The brushed aluminium lid is stylish, and the edge to edge, 1366x768 screen is great. It's slim, it's reasonably lightweight, and yet it still manages to pack in three USB ports, a headphone out jack, gigabit Ethernet, SD/MMC card reader, HDMI out and through a mini-adapter, VGA out. It does forgo the optical drive, and you lose an external microphone jack, but for its size it's acceptably featured.
What is annoying is that most of these ports are hidden behind flaps, which can frustrate connections. There's also a hot air vent on the left, meaning that any external left-handed mouse users will likely get their digits warmed.
Covers: making port accessibility a pain since the dawn of computing. (Credit: CBS Interactive)
The touchpad is Elantech's multi-touch pad, meaning you can scroll by swiping two fingers, right-click by tapping three, and middle-click by tapping two. Interestingly, the fancy multi-touch gestures that are usually inaccurate on the PC, from the pinch-zoom action to rotating, to magnification — have disappeared from Elantech's control panel — perhaps an admission they need some work. The surface of the touchpad itself is stippled, almost like Braille — but this doesn't translate to an enjoyable experience.
Little bumps do not make for a pleasant mousing experience. (Credit: CBS Interactive)
There are two dedicated buttons that are above the keyboard — on the right, power, with an obvious white LED when the laptop is on, and to the left, Asus' ExpressGate quick launcher, with the exact same style of light. There are a pair of white LEDs under the lip, but are rendered functionally useless as they can't be seen when using the laptop.
The UX30 runs off Windows Vista Business, but sadly only the 32-bit version — meaning that the 4GB RAM included can't be completely used, limiting the laptop to 2.96GB. A Norton Internet Security 2009 trial is bundled, as is a re-branded PowerDVD (to "AsusDVD"), CyberLink's Power2Go, Picasa 3, Microsoft Office 2007 trial and Google toolbar.
Asus bundles in a re-branded Logitech mouse too, but it can be best described as "functional" because it has difficulty with some surfaces and feels a little cheap.
Performance
Internally, the UX30 features an Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 @ 1.4GHz, 4GB RAM, a 500GB hard drive, 802.11n and Bluetooth support.
In 3DMark06, the integrated Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics meant the UX30 struggled, scoring 678, making it not suitable for gaming. PCMark05 showed a different story though, scoring 3551, meaning the UX30 works fine as a productivity machine.
Turning off all power-saving features, setting the screen brightness and volume to maximum and playing back an XviD file, the UX30 lasted one hour, 57 minutes and three seconds, a little disappointing considering the low power CPU, and that the battery is non-removable. It is a harsh test — but it should still be scoring higher.
The UX30 gets oh so close to what it strives to achieve, but small design choices like the stippled touchpad and port covers, and large issues like the low battery life prevent it from achieving greatness.
6%
1%
Unimpressive graphics, questionable ergonomics, hobbled RAM, short battery life. And almost 8 out of 10. If it had an Apple logo on it you'd have given it 5.