Gadgetory

well this is Johanna for The Verge and this is the Asus Zenbook ux301 which really means this is a Seuss's first ultra book and the first thing you're going to notice about this system is obviously how strikingly similar it looks to the MacBook Air at least from its profile this is a very thin system but it also tapers down just like the air 2 point 11 inches it weighs two point eight pounds it actually feels a little heftier than that in hands the other thing that I've really been impressed with having reviewed the Acer last week is how solid the hardware feels it's made out of aluminum and the top has this concentric circle pattern as they're calling it you get a nice aluminum palm rest and also a really nice and solid keyboard deck there's no flex to the keyboard but the keys are a little bit shallow the biggest problem with the hardware here is the touchpad it can become really really flaky the cursor can jump all over the screen and sometimes it will actually launch applications on its own I'm not really sure how it does that it boots really quickly thanks to the 128 gigabyte SSD which allows the system to not only boot in under 15 seconds but resume from sleep in two seconds as well on top of that the battery life is really good I got about five hours and thirty minutes on my battery rundown test but I also have in real life have gotten closer to 6 or 6 and a half overall for $1,100 a Suze has done a really nice job with the Zen book the hardware is beautiful it performs really great and the battery life is really good but unfortunately that touchpad issue is a pretty big issue if you could live with that the Zen book is actually a really good laptop but if you can the air is still the best choice