I love the way it feels in my hands, great form factor and weight. I can lug this around campus and at work when I'm squashing trouble tickets. Unlike my old ultrabook, this guy doesn't bend when I hold it out with one hand.It has the 3rd gen(Ivy Bridge) i5 and is over all pretty snappy. I'm not entirely sure of the specific chipset but I get the feeling it is one of the better of the 77 mobile chipsets, overall it responds quicker then my previous (also Ivy Bridge) ultrabook.
I'm a little disappointed with the battery life, but I still average 5 hours, not awful but I've had better from previous devices. I'm also not too happy with the radio antenna, they are this oddly small size on the connectors, so I wasn't able to swap out the Intel Centrino for my AR8295 which would allow me to do some fancy stuff like put the card in AP mode and inject packets (for normal people the Centrino is fine) I'm sure I can find some kind of adapter but it is just an inconvenience. Getting to everything in the case is easy too, replacing the HDD with my SSD was a quick procedure though you'll need a T5 driver which isn't something Joe User is typically going to have on hand. Unlike most ultrabooks the memory is not soldered into the board, there is a mobile DIMM socket making upgrading in the future is possible.
The first thing I did with this bad boy is blow Microsuck Windoze 8 away and install Gentoo Linux with kernel version 3.8.2. Most everything works out of the box with a couple exceptions:
-Bluetooth: you'll need some AR3012 firmware, I'm fairly certain distros like Ubuntu and Fedora have this in their default kernel, but if you build your own it isn't readily obvious this is what you need to do for Bluetooth to work.
-Hotkeys: leave it to Microsuck to make life harder for everyone, an update to the firmware breaks the keyboard and display brightness hotkeys because of changes to Windoze 8's screen brightness controls. Again, this stuff should work out of the box with distros like Ubuntu and Fedora but if you are forging your own path you might need to consult the help.ubuntu.com site and look at some of the workarounds they've built into the default install.
If I could have installed my AR8295 wireless NIC without having to hunt for some kind of adapter (who knows, I might not find such an adapter) I could have looked passed the battery life and given this a 5/5 rating.
Overall the costs are negligible, especially for the price, and this is a very enjoyable computer to use. I'd recommend it to anybody looking for a competitive, and competitively priced, alternative to a MacBook Air.I saw this Asus Zenbook with the perfect specs for my needs, it was my dream laptop, 3rd gen core I5, anti-glare screen (i still don't understand why manufactures keep making full glare screens on professional and portable netbooks that likely will be used out there with all the glare)hybrid hard drive, USB 3. super light weight and the sexiest looks.
I went to office depot with the cash in my hand ready to buy it until I tested the webcam on the store.. what a disapointment!!! they call that HD !!?? Shame!! just for that I changed my mind.
that and the fact that you can not upgrade the memory,4gb ram and that's the maximum you can get as per the specs sheet.
I had some of their netbooks before,the 1215N and the 1215B they make amazing laptops with amazing specs and then they drop the ball big time with their poor 0.3 webcams. I have stayed away from Asus for the last two years for that reason alone(I have been keeping an eye on their products and they keep putting out the worse webcams in the market).
I skype every night with my girlfriend and my family in Spain and I expect a good HD webcam experience now a days specially on this premium ultrabooks. When they get decent HD webcams I may return to Asus....This is not a bad unit. The problem is the OS. Windows 8, what a POS. I wish I had noticed that before I ordered it. I wish it had 7 or anything older.
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