Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Minnemann from TechnoBuffalo and in this video we're gonna unbox the new asus UL 30 VT laptop this laptop does a lot of interesting tricks we're gonna talk about that in a minute but first a bit of a story of how I got to this point I've actually been looking for a laptop for about three months now I do all my work on a desktop and I also have a dell mini 10 netbook for web browsing but the netbook really can't run Photoshop it can't playback HD video on YouTube it's not really a productivity tool I can't get much work done on the netbook it's simply too underpowered to do anything really significant so I've been looking for a laptop that fits really four criteria number one is size and weight I wanted it to be very portable almost as portable as a netbook but with a bigger screen so 13-inch screen the Asus is about four pounds which is extremely light and it's quite thin to number two price was a huge consideration I wanted to stay under $1000 the Asus used to be as of a few days ago $7.99 which is an awesome value for what you get but as of today they've actually increased the price 150 dollars to 949 I think because this is one of the most popular laptops that that is shipping this holiday season hopefully it'll come down in price come the the winter and the spring number three I wanted power I wanted the ability to use Photoshop and watch HD video on YouTube and run many many applications at one time without the system getting slow this laptop has actually a Core 2 Duo processor that is under clocked it's an ultra-low voltage processor it's only running at one point three gigahertz but I've heard that that's overclockable to 1.7 gigahertz and additionally this laptop actually has two graphics engines the first is an integrated intel graphics engine that you find on many laptops out there but it also has an NVIDIA GPU which is really great because you can toggle between these two modes on the fly to either get more battery life or get better performance if you're trying to play a game for example or do HD video rendering and number four battery life was a significant criteria for getting a laptop and the Asus UL 30 VT claims to get 12 hours of battery life although you know manufacturer claims are always way too high I've been hearing and reading about nine to ten hours of battery life is reasonable which is really high that's the entire day of work that you can get through with this laptop and again the way that it does that is through that ultra low voltage processor coupled with the graphics card switching to save on power so let's get to the unboxing I've been waiting for this for a very long time and I'm sure you're curious to see what this laptop is like it's like we have a box inside of the box okay so we have some specs here that will zoom in on let's see what we have here so each cell battery this is the CPU CPU the ulv SU 7300 has a 500 gigabyte 5400 rpm hard drive although I will be installing this guy the Intel X 25 M solid-state drive it's 80 gigabytes to increase performance further and to get more battery life out of this laptop and we're going to be covering how to actually do that in in future videos so watch out for that it's continued down the line here let's continue down the line we have four gigabytes of RAM although they show it as two gigabytes times two ddr3 it's running Windows 7 home premium edition 64-bit it has 802 11 B G and n Wi-Fi I think it also has bluetooth and that's that's pretty much it for specifications let's zoom back out and cut into the box here the box actually feels quite heavy I guess there's a lot of documentation in here because as I mentioned the laptop is only about four pounds as a comparison a lot of netbooks out there are around three pounds so somewhat of a bland box Smart Notebook smart.you yes they're trying to keep costs low by having a boring box let's see what it's like to open up this guy another oh all right so it looks like the laptop is in the bottom section here I think we can pull it out like so okay here's the laptop we'll take a look at that in a second let's see what we get in the box what kind of accessories there are so this must be the the charger pretty small not as small as some other laptops out there but that's not big of a deal hopefully this will stay off the charger with the incredible battery life see what else do we get inside the box here is the battery it should sit flush with the laptop and not stick out like some other batteries alright and here's the other side of the power cord nothing terribly interesting and let's see what kind of software comes with this we have a cable tie okay for the power cable power to go looks like software for burning programs we've got some drivers and utilities and then we have Windows 7 recovery disks so this is the reinstallation CD that I will be using because I'm gonna put the solid-state drive in immediately and install windows 7 from scratch and hopefully it doesn't carry over all of the Asus programs that tend to sort of you know make things a little bit bloated we've got the Express gate manual I think this is a Seuss's instant-on operating system that lets you access multimedia and things like that you can kind of see here you can access Skype and Internet and from this instant on operating system that probably runs in Linux something like that have to take a look at that user manual and let's see the laptop I was also looking at the sony vaio laptop sr series because it's very similar in size and weight and even price but I went with the Asus because the reviews came in very glowing and you know the ability to switch from one GPU to the other to save on battery is really cool so let's take off this plastic and and what we have on the front here is this really nice brushed metal look it's a very high quality let me take off this little piece of plastic is covering up the logo okay very nice it's very light the batteries not in right now of course let's let's open her up this has an LED backlit display which helps to save on power okay so a million stickers here that I'm gonna have to remove let's start by taking off the one on the screen up here on the webcam on the on the touchpad down here extremely thin wow this feels probably thinner than my netbook and we'll do a size comparison in a second the touchpad is an interesting texture it actually has little bumps on them it's gonna be hard to get used to this also is multi-touch like the MacBook so that you can actually do two fingers scrolling and there's some other gestures you can do so we have a chiclet style keyboard here also like the MacBook and some other laptops out there which is I actually prefer I think it's more comfortable here's the switch up here that will switch between the two GPUs and I hear that you have to reboot the system in order to get to the other GPU but we'll have to test that see what else it says up here sixteen by nine green LED backlit panel ddr3 RAM iSchool palm rest so they're saying the palm rest doesn't get hot down here it says instant boot up smart power manager eco friendly Global warranty blah blah blah okay so that's annoying let's take off that sticker that's better and we'll take off this sticker as well so I'm gonna put in the battery just to get a feel for how heavy it is when everything is together so I'm gonna close the lid very thin lid by the way I think that's helped by the LED backlight and so I'm going to snap this in okay that was easy and it does stick out a little bit but not too much so it's a very lightweight laptop that's for sure and it's quite thin too we're gonna go over all the ports on the sides in a in a future video but let's take a look at this compared to the dell mini 10 which is in 11 inch netbook so the isus is not significantly bigger it's obviously wider in both dimensions let's see the thickness I'm actually going to say that the the Asus is thinner than the netbook which is quite remarkable and it's especially really really thin down here towards the edge so we've got a lot more coming up on the Asus UL 30 VT we're gonna put a solid-state drive in here we're gonna mess around with overclocking and do some other performance tweaks and talk about the experience of this new laptop and whether it actually gets 10 or 12 hours of battery life which would be quite remarkable a lot more to come that's it for now