I was window-shopping for laptops today and discovered the amazing Asus UL30 series. It’s truly an amazing piece of engineering: it’s thin, it’s light, it’s fast, has an insane battery life, and pretty cheap. Let me break down the specs for you non-geeks:
Core 2 Duo SU7300 Processor:
It has a 1.3Ghz (up to 1.7Ghz with TurboBoost technology), ultra-low-voltage processor manufactured on 45nm technology. Which really just means the processor can do a LOT of work while barely sipping on your precious battery. Honestly, it’s unbelievable how fast this processor is while using less than 10W of power. [Compare with a 13 MacBook Pro: slightly slower, but uses 1/3rd the power)
Nvidia G210M 512MB and Intel 4500 Graphics:
This .93 inch thin laptop has TWO graphics cards. The Nvidia G210 is probably the fastest graphics card available on a 13 inch laptop. It's build on 40nm technology, and uses a max of 14W of power, which is still impressive for a graphics card of this caliber. The Intel is slower, but uses even less power. You can toggle between the 2 to trade off performance for battery life. [Compare with a 13" MacBook Pro: The Asus is twice as fast, while using the same amount of juice]
4GB DDR3 RAM:
Also, the laptop can support a max of 8GB of memory, you know… in case you need that much. [Same as Macbooks.]
13inch LED-lit Screen:
LED also means it’s uses less power than regular backlights. [same as Macbooks]
12 hour battery life:
…or so Asus claims, you can probably expect 10 hours of real world usage, and maybe 4-5 hours of gaming/heavy 3D work. [much longer than the MacBook Pros]
Design:
Not quite on par with Apple’s drool inducing one-piece aluminum finish, but it’s one of the nicer laptops I’ve seen (once you get rid of all the stickers). The design is obviously Macbook inspired. And it’s really light and thin.
Price:
$800 USD. I know you can get an even faster 15″ laptop for $900, but the battery life and portability also suffers as you up the screen size. 13″ with this amount of computing power is perfect. It also comes with all the standard bells and whistles: webcam, bluetooth, 802.11n, and a half terabyte harddrive.
The bottom line:
if you are looking for a portable powerhouse, take a closer look at this laptop. If you want raw power and don’t care about battery life or portability, skip this.
Update: I’ve had this laptop for almost a year now and am very happy about it. It’s light enough to be carried everywhere, and with 8 hours of up time on the integrated video card (can be stretched to 10 if you are stingy on screen brighness or wifi), I don’t even need to carry the AC adapter unless I plan an overnight trip. My only complain is that the screen has an absolutely horrific viewing angle, color shifts are common when viewed off-axis; and black is a muddy gray at best. But once you plug this thing into an IPS display via the build in VGA or HDMI cable, the Nvidia G210M chip is beefy enough to play StarCraft II at medium settings.
