ASUS Zenbook UX31E-DH53 13.3" Silver Aluminum Ultrabook

Pros: Great screen resolution and brightness, excellent hardware specs, Elegant design, fast boot but with several fatal flaws.

Cons: Biggest flaw is the power cord. It's flimsy and won't stay plugged in. It bends easily. Two power cables have been damaged almost beyond functionality from normal light weight use. Not much use if you can't keep it powered up. Keyboard action not very pleasing. Some keys sticky from day 1. Headphone plug never functioned right. Won't work if headphones plugged all the way in. Must pull plug out ~0.5 mm to work.

Other Thoughts: Asus tech support is useless. Wanted to buy the extended warranty early on. Could never get through to anyone at Asus that could would take my money. Won't buy Asus laptop again.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

Sorry to hear that you are having an issue with the power adapter. If your unit is sitll under warranty, I suggest you send the unit in for service.

Regarding extended warranty, we do not provide extended warranty for any of our notebooks.

If you have any questions or comments you can email me again at cl-jeffrey@asus.com which I reside in the U.S

ASUS strives to meet and exceeds our customer expectations within our warranty policy.

Regards,

Jeffrey
ASUS Customer Loyalty

Pros: Great Ultrabook - enjoyed using it before it broke.

Cons: Beware buying from this company! If you attempt to have them honor their warranty they will give you a constant run around. Support gives out phone numbers that do not work - email support asks repeatedly for an invoice that I have sent three times. If you buy from Asus you are on your own.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

Sorry to hear that you are having trouble having your unit shipped in to be repaired under warranty.

If you have any questions or comments you can email me again at cl-jeffrey@asus.com which I reside in the U.S and I will see what I can do for you.

ASUS strives to meet and exceeds our customer expectations within our warranty policy.

Regards,

Jeffrey
ASUS Customer Loyalty

Pros: Light, fast, easy to use, long battery life. Best part is everything is made out of machined aluminum.

Cons: the display shorts to the lid. I have found after several returns to ASUS that they don't know how to fix this problem. I have to put my thumbs in the center of the screen and grab the top corners and gently flex the screen to make the screen go back to normal. What asus has been doing is replacing the video processor and lcd display. this is only good until your fat cat sits on it or pick it up from the corner upside down. Also you can't upgrade the memmory. it's soldered directly to the mother board.

Other Thoughts: poor design as far as the memmory and display are concerned. otherwise i would be happy to buy another one.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

Sorry to hear that you do not like the design of this laptop. The only model that you are able to upgrade the ram is the UX32A.

If you have any questions or comments you can email me at cl-jeffrey@asus.com which I reside in the U.S

ASUS strives to meet and exceeds our customer expectations within our warranty policy.

Regards,

Jeffrey
ASUS Customer Loyalty

Pros: Slim & light. Boot time is amazing, battery life good. Looks awesome. Very sturdy. Constructed well.. Solid feel

Cons: Wireless is pathetic. Losses connection all the time.

Other Thoughts: Had for about 3 weeks now. I love it except the wifi issue. That's huge. I would return it but on my way to Afghanistan and I bought it for that. No time to ship back. Tried updating drivers and bios. Still same issue. Maybe I'll try buying a better wifi card online. This seems to be a huge issue, seeing it in write ups from a few people. Asus needs to fix this! Useless without wifi

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

Sorry to hear that the wifi is inot working properly. Here is a link below that you can try to get the wifi working again. Have you also tried going into device manager and tried rolling back the drivers. Can you tell me which driver version you have installed on your laptop.

http://support.asus.com/Troubleshooting/detail.aspx?SLanguage=en&p=3&m=UX31E&s=369&hashedid=okyFhGJT4AM8jMkZ&os=&no=1773

If you have any questions or comments you can email me at cl-jeffrey@asus.com

ASUS strives to meet and exceeds our customer expectations within our warranty policy.

Regards,

Jeffrey
ASUS Customer Loyalty

Pros: Very light and fast. I carry it everywhere. Removes the need to carry a tablet since this thing is so darn light. The build is quite good although the design is close copy of Macbook Air.

Cons: I had it for 6 months now and the battery calibration is totally OFF. It shuts down once it reaches 20% battery without warning. Very annoying

Pros: Fast boot, quiet, small, light, doesn't get hot.

Cons: Wireless would drop connection every few minutes.

Would not wake up from sleep/hibernate sometimes.

Now it would not work at all.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

Sorry to hear that you are having a problem with the sleep and hibernate function. Have you tried updating the bios and drivers. Usually updating the drivers solve this issue.

Have you tried pressing the power button for a couple times with the adapter removed. What may have to be done is to drain the battery completely so the sleep issue will reset and start right back up.

Do you have anything connected in the USB ports when it goes to sleep. Do you close the lid before it goes completely asleep?

Please email at cl-jeffrey@asus.com with C1042-2586 in the subject line.

ASUS strives to meet and exceeds our customer expectations within our warranty policy.

Regards,

Jeffrey
ASUS Customer Loyalty

Pros: Love the high resolution screen. Very fast boot up time. I don't usually use sleep mode for my big i7 laptop because it suck alot of battery but I don't really have to worried about this here. Very thin and light and is one of the main reason I bought this for work. Has one of the better multi-touch mouse pad out there. Asus included a few extras accessories which I think gave this ultrabook more value (the competing fruit company will charge you for this). Speaker sound quality is as good as my Sony Vaio i7 laptop and that saying alot.

Cons: I'm really had a hard time deciding to get this or the Toshiba z835 because that one has a lite-up keyboard. To my surprise, due to the reflective metal aluminum of the keyboard, it reflex light on to it so I can see what I'm typing in the dark. Don't know about everyone but keyboard does tend to skip a letter or two. Mousepad does tend to delay sometime even after the driver update which is kind of annoying. Also very sluggish on Battery Life Boost mode (I wish I can set it to always High Performance) and I would only recommended the mode to be turn on while watching a movie or web browsing only. For the price, Intel i5 could use a boost to i7. Also mousepad should have a divider between the actual mousepad and the left and right mouse button because it's hard to feel where they are sometime.

Other Thoughts: Overall, I really like this ultrabook. I bought this laptop from BB because I need it fast for work. Asus has one of the best warranty so I feel confident buying their products. I wish the keyboard and mousepad performed better. I hope Asus still working on bringing new driver to help solved some problem like mouse/keyboard delayed and program force close.

Pros: Lightweight
Thin - it is unbelievably thin
Durable - more sturdy than laptops twice the weight
Fast - the SSD is not the fastest, but the laptop boots in under 20 seconds and resumes from sleep in 2

Cons: Setup - re-installing because of the bloatware takes time, and Asus requires things to be installed in a specific order otherwise you get errors (this order can't be found anywhere)
Screen - it is a little faded and washed-out
Touchpad - this thing is the worst, even with the update. The solution is to put an artificial delay between when a key is pressed and when the touchpad will respond. This might be OK for people who move slow, but power users will not be happy.

Other Thoughts: Overall I'm really impressed. This is the first worthy PC version of a Macbook Air.

Pros: This ultrabook, is everything it promises to be. Light, capable, fast, sturdy, sounds great, and is very stylish.
The SSD gives it amazing boot/wake times. The 1600x900 screen is very viewable, at least for one person.
The chicklet style keys are very large, and easily locatable. Though you will have to press a little harder than
I am used to pressing on desktop, and other notebook keyboards. The speakers are the best I have ever heard on a notebook.
And the volume is very adequate. The CPU handles everything I have thrown at it, including virtual machine sessions,
and streaming video sites. Battery life in normal use seems to be between 5 and 6 hours with wi-fi on.
The wireless connectivity, despite what one review that I had read said, has been consistently good.

Cons: At higher brightness the colors seem a little washed out, but drop the brightness a bit and they are fine.
I have not experienced any of the track-pad issues others have claimed, but I did have it go all wonky
a couple of times when I slid my fingers too close to the "buttons", I am not used to such a large track pad.
One thing I miss with the track-pad is that there seems not to be any scroll areas on it.
It seems to take around 3 hours to charge a fully discharged battery, while also using the computer.

Other Thoughts: I would recommend this to anyone wanting a powerful, yet very light, notebook. I am not sure I would wish to write a book on it's keyboard,
and I am glad I usually use a wireless mouse, but I can get by using both the chicklet keyboard, and track-pad. Despite several hours of
significant use, the zenbook stayed reasonably cool.