We review Asus’ breathtaking UX302LA!

Asus has a penchant for making jaw-droppingly beautiful notebooks and ultrabooks, especially for their hi-end range. The Zenbook Prime is one such beast, which thoroughly impressed us back when it was unveiled a few years ago. Today we’ll be reviewing a notebook that they unveiled a few months ago, the confusingly named UX302LA. While their naming convention don’t exactly roll off your tongue, the company more than makes up for it by offering a gorgeous product that would satisfy the needs of the most demanding consumer.

Asus UX302LA specs

• 13.3-inch IPS full HD display with 10-point multitouch, 1920 x 1080 resolution
• Intel Core i5-4200U processor
• 4GB of RAM
• 500GB storage, with SSD
• Intel HD Graphics 4400
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0
• Windows 8 OS
• Php 62,995

Beautiful chassis made out of glass and aluminum

If there’s one thing Asus knows how to do, it’s make really, really pretty notebooks. The UX302LA is no exception – the ultrabook uses a combination of both glass and aluminum in the design and construction of the device. While the UX302LA has a lot of notable design elements, the most striking is the lid – the UX302LA uses Corning’s Gorilla Glass 3 to protect the lid of the ultrabook, a first for devices of its class. While it’s definitely beautiful, the choice of material begs the question – what happens when you accidentally drop it? While Corning’s solution is definitely strong, we’ve seen terrible things happen to notebooks in our lifetime. A hard object dropped (or thrown, we’ve seen it happen) at the UX302LA may shatter the glass protection, Gorilla Glass or no.

Underneath the glass lid lies Asus’ trademark concentric metal pattern that’s been with us since they unveiled their Zenbook line of ultrabooks. Whatever our complaints are with the Glass, there’s no denying that the lid looks absolutely beautiful, though we did notice that it’s a bit of a smudge magnet.

Moving on to the device itself, you’d see that it’s relatively thin for an ultrabook, having a thickness of just 17.2mm. It weighs in at around 1.4 kilograms, which isn’t bad as ultrabooks go. The backlit keyboard isn’t cramped as other ultrabooks, and the keys themselves have plenty of travel.

There are 3 USB 3.0 ports, with one able to pump out up to 2A of power allowing you to charge your mobile devices faster than with regular ol’ USB. Two video ports – HDMI and mini DisplayPort means that you can connect the UX302LA to most TVs, projectors and monitors out there.

Like most ultrabooks, the One UX302LA uses a clickpad trackpad, which means that the trackpad acts like the left mouse button when you click on it. Depending on your preference, this may or may not be a good thing – personally we’re not a fan of it (nor the separated left and right mouse buttons).

The UX302LA uses a 13.3-inch IPS full HD display with 10-point multitouch. While the display is bright and vivid, the display angles aren’t fantastic. It’s not as bad as say TFT panels out there obviously, but you’ll definitely notice loss of brightness when you’re not facing the display head on. That being said, color reproduction is very good, though the display suffers a lot when used outdoors.

Fast performance, quick boot up

With the price being what it is, we expected the UX302LA’s performance to be relatively quick. The Intel Core i5 processor, coupled with hybrid storage setup that the device uses (500GB of storage with a small 16GB SSD) meant that the UX302LA is able to post quick, 15 second boot times, and 2-5 second wake from sleep time. The UX302LA is certainly a quick ultrabook.

As far as general performance is concerned, the UX302LA is able to handle most daily tasks and some light to moderate gaming. Overall navigation is quick and transitions are smooth, which is to be expected. Of course, it’ll have trouble with demanding games like Call of Duty or Titanfall since the device only has an integrated GPU via the Intel HD Graphics 4400. It’s definitely not a gaming machine.

Battery life on par with most ultrabooks

As far as battery life is concerned, the UX302LA isn’t an all day ultrabook. With brightness set to auto, the device only lasted around 4 hours and 57 minutes with light to moderate use, which is a bit disappointing, considering that other ultrabooks are able to go past the 5 hour mark easily. Apparently the aggressive automatic brightness feature is to blame for this – with the brightness set manually to 50%, the UX302LA managed to last around 6 hours and 34 minutes with light to moderate use. This puts the UX302LA on par with other ultrabooks of its class.

The ultrabook to get if you have really deep pockets

So, should you get the Asus UX302LA? Well, it entirely depends on how deep your pockets are. It certainly is beautiful, and the interesting choice of materials make it stand out from other thin and light options out in the market today. It’s also one of the most expensive, coming in at a savings destroying Php 62,995. It makes sense though – nice things don’t come cheap – and the performance and more importantly, the design, build and materials used in the UX302LA makes the price more than fair.