ASUS Zenbook UX305LA Review

2015 can be considered as the year of ultrabooks with major manufacturers launching their flagship ultrabooks into the market. The premium 13.3 inch ASUS Zenbook UX305LA launched last year competes with the likes of Dell XPS 13(non-touch), Macbook Air 13.

Design and features

The new 13-inch ASUS Zenbook takes slimness to a whole new level.  At just 12.3mm, it is the world’s slimmest 13.3-inch QHD ultraportable laptop. It’s really, really light and weighs 1.30Kg, can be easily carried with one hand and is lighter than HP Spectre x360.

The ASUS Zenbook UX305LA has killing looks in aurora metallic color and does screams of a premium laptop. The interior is also made of metal that certainly feels and looks great. The top panel sports a brushed aluminum finish spread out in a radial manner with diamond cut edges at sides that looks elegant. Overall the build quality is impressive.

On the left side it is host to 2 USB 2.0 ports and a SD card reader. The right side houses charging port, mini display port, USB 3.0, Full HDMI and 3.5mm audio jack plus battery status LED which flashes orange when you are low on battery.

With the dual outputs (HDMI and mini-DisplayPort), the Zenbook UX305LA  can drive two external monitors at once and can access content across multiple screens.

Performance

The Quad HD+ display clubbed with ASUS Splendid technology looks great and gives you vivid, accurate colors all times. It works by automatically fine-tuning various display settings to optimize all kinds of images. The colors, brightness levels and contrast ratios looks great be it watching videos, surfing internet or even while reading out text. The scrolling and other multi-touch gestures worked fine. Even when viewed off axis the Quad HD screen delivers wide viewing angles with minimal to no color lag and you will definitely enjoy working on it.

The Intel Core i5-5200U Processor with base clock speed of 2.2GHz coupled with 8GB of RAM delivered fast performance with applications loading in an instant. Whether you are editing high end videos or running intensive tasks, the system delivers enough power to run those. In PC Mark 8 Work test suite that comprises of web browsing, writing, video chat and spreadsheet test, it scored 3598 just behind the HP Spectre x360 with a score of 3744. The on board Intel HD 5500 graphics delivered good graphic capability. You can run light to medium processing games like League of Legends but not the heavy games like GTA V. In 3D Mark that measures graphic power it scored 33848.

The chiclet style keyboard has good tactile feedback with key travel of 1.5mm, offers comfortable typing experience and you can type for hours feeling any discomfort in fingers.

As it's the things with ultrabooks, you get LED back-lit keyboard here also and switch between low, medium to high settings. The trackpad is beautifully complementing the design of laptop. The scrolling and zooming worked fluently. At times, the  multi-touch gesture lagged a bit but in the long run it worked fine and smooth.

The two Bang and Olufsen speakers located at left and right delivered loud sound and sounded best at 70-80% volume levels with appreciable amount of bass and clear vocals.

Speaking of battery life, the Zenbook delivered approximately 11 hours of juice on a full charge that too with casual usage like web browsing, streaming content on YouTube and at 50% brightness levels.