With the MacBook Pro firmly entrenched as the gold standard in premium portable computing, PC makers have been striving for years to come up with a formula that bests Apple’s offerings. The latest contender to throw its hat into the ring is ASUS’s 2015 flagship laptop, the ZenBook Pro UX501, newly arrived on Indian shores. It is well designed and powered by very powerful hardware. However, it also comes with a couple of major flaws that could be showstoppers depending on how you use your laptop.
Design The ZenBook Pro does a great job of attempting to recreate the magic without seeming like a knockoff. The chasis is extremely sleek and made of aluminium with a brushed metal feel while the interior is plastic. The lid features ASUS’s classic spun-metal design and the keypad area comes with circular speaker grilles elegantly woven into the design. The case does have a little bit of give in the centre, but is quite rigid otherwise. The keypad has the full array of keys including a numpad. It offers good travel and is comfortable to type on but the silver lettering combined with white backlight means that the keys can be hard to read under certain lighting conditions. The Elan touchpad supports multi-touch gestures and is fairly roomy but isn’t as accurate as Microsoft’s Precision offerings. With SD Card, Thunderbolt and HDMI options in addition to the three USB 3.0 ports, the UX501 comes with a good range of connectivity options distributed evenly on either side. Since the laptop is only 21mm thick, there is no space for Ethernet or VGA ports, which are provided in the form of USB adaptors.
Battery life ASUS claims a 6-hour battery life on the UX501, but we averaged about 4.5 hours during our testing with WiFi on, brightness set to half and multimedia and productivity applications being used constantly.
This is hugely inferior to the MacBook Pro’s 9-hour rating, but the ZenBook Pro does have superior specs.
Bottomline The ZenBook Pro UX 501 might be thin enough to be an ultrabook, but its high-end specs and weak battery life mean that it is really a desktop replacement. It is easily the best looking laptop in this category and offers impressive performance to boot.
The 4K display is a feature that it could have done without, but it is possible to forget bad scaling when you’re being wowed by games and films playing out in stunning visual quality.
The top of the line Zenbook Pro will prove a good buy for users who crave a huge amount of power in an attractive package. Just as long as they don’t care about colour accuracy.
Price: ₹115,999
Love: Design, performance
Hate: Display issues