At around $800 for a 15 inch, this laptop undercuts the Apple Macbook Pro by about half. It is thin and light and with great decent build quality. The multi touch mouse is a little too sensitive but I believe with the correct collaboration, it can be easily fixed. The screen is bright with the LED backlighting. The battery in real life test lasted me about 8-9 hours while surfing the internet. There are additional features which I have yet to masters like smart login with camera. All in all, very satisfied with the purchase. The only thing I found a bit disappointing is that one of the rubber thingies that hides the screw already came off on day two. It does not impact the performance in anyway but it's a bit disappointing. Also there are alot of screw points around the monitor as well which was a bit of a surprise. The 15.6" widescreen is a bit non standard and cannot fit into my LV messenger bag. Windows 7 64 bit requires a bit of adjustments to work with older apps. But other than that, this is a beautiful, FAST, LIGHT alternative to the MacBook Pro.
A modern laptop design thin, lightweight, long battery life, and very nice screen. Unless you are a power user (ie processing speed), I'd get it. Probably the lowest quality aspect is the keyboard I'm not sure why they didn't tighten the keyboard up a bit, because they obviously spent a lot of time on all other aspects. The keys are loose feeling, and it's a bit clangy. On the other hand, I like having the numeric keypad will be great for certain games like Civ. And clearly, you can still type on it. I'm giving it 5 stars anyway because the overall package of price and quality is still a great deal. Windows 7 is much improved versus Vista. They have a lot of stylish icons and whatnot in the ASUS Bios, and they have even spent the time to put a fastboot OS onto the laptop it really is like a 5 second boot. Not worth using in my opinion since Windows 7 boots quite quickly itself.
This is my first Asus, having had Gateways, Dells, and several IBMs before. Comparisons to a MacBook pro aren't totally off-base my wife is sitting beside me with her MacBook Pro, and the screens are definitely comparable, as well as the thinness, lightness, etc. However, there is the keyboard thing. Then again, my wife's macbook has gone in twice for a keyboard repair. Hmm.
Battery life is of course awesome. The warranty is very good as well, better than most other manufacturers'.
Buy ASUS UL50AG-A2 Thin and Light 15.6-Inch Black Laptop - 12 Hours of Battery Life (Windows 7 Home Pre Now
Overall good value laptop for the price paid $750 including sales tax.
positive: super thin and light, large hard drive @500gb, bright LED widescreen, HDMI out at 1080 resolution, webcam which has face-recognition authentication, 10 key number pad, decent altec lansing speakers, stay cool keyboard, quiet fan, averaging 10+ hour battery life.
negative: windows 7 premium 64bit OS is a bit buggy with 32bit apps and device drivers , no built-in bluetooth, fingerprints left on black brushed aluminum case, maximum capacity of 4gb ram.
The laptop uses the su7300 Intel core 2 duo processors, which in my opinion is more than adequate for a poweruser. I can run adobe CS4 suite, MS Office, several different browsers and VMware workstation running 2 VMs (2003 server and Fedora Core11) all at the same time.
I was considering buying a Macbook pro laptop but after seeing this at my local BB store, I bought it on impulse and am more than happy with this purchase. Best laptop I have ever bought, i'm official done with HP, Lenovo, and Acer brands.
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First, some background:
I've been a Mac user for 10 years or so as my primary machine. I use a MacBook Pro and OS X as my work machine and needed a secondary laptop for personal use.
I couldn't justify dropping $2,000 for another MacBook Pro so close to Christmastime, but I could justify $600 to $700 for this unit. I've had it for a couple of weeks now and love it.
The Good:
While it does not have the claimed 12 hour battery life, you can easily get 7-10 hours out of it depending on how you configure brightness etc. More than enough to make it a joy to use.
The screen is 15.6 (call it 16" widescreen) and is bright and crisp with plenty of room to work in.
Chicklet keys are really nice touch. In general the unit is really solid and fast.
The one year warranty ASUS has is unusual in that it covers spills and drops. Other manufacturers have this available but you have to pay for it. Comes standard with ASUS.
The Bad:
As other reviewers before have said, there is a very slight flex in the keyboard, but to me it is not noticable, nor do I really care because it doesn't affect my typing.
The exterior black is a neat finish but again, as other reviewers have stated, it is a fingerprint magnet. Not too much of a concern for me though because the machine is a joy to use. Really. It is. If you buy this you will not be disappointed.
The Ugly:
I've tried really hard the past two weeks to find something wrong with the machine and really the only thing that is bad about it is that it runs Windows 7 rather than OS X. Windows 7 is not a bad OS and on this machine it is quite fast, particularly if you don't load up a new laptop with software right when you get it, but rather install one program a day to see if any give you problems.
Final recommendations:
Strongly recommend two things with the purchase of this unit. One is the Microsoft ARC Wireless Mouse. Very cool.
The other is a Backblaze account for set it and forget it, backup. . Get the $50 per year account rather than the $5/month and for less than five bucks a month you will have offsite backup and peace of mind.
In terms of how this unit compares to the MacBook Pro?
The MBP is undoubtedly a more solid machine and the solid aluminum carved block is a joy to use. But if you don't have the money for it and if you need a solid, reliable unit that is fairly similar, this ASUS is a really solid choice; and at $600 to $700, you're not going to find anything comparable to it in the PC line. Trust me, I know. Before buying this unit at Best Buy, I looked at ThinkPads, ACERs, HP, Toshiba, Sony and DELL.
I'm sold on ASUS.
Hope this helps!
Want ASUS UL50AG-A2 Thin and Light 15.6-Inch Black Laptop - 12 Hours of Battery Life (Windows 7 Home Pre Discount?
I bought this computer mainly because of the claims made about the battery life. I am in college and my laptop goes everywhere that I do. I use a laptop to take lecture notes in all of my classes and on days when I am on campus for 5 plus hours, I really needed to step up the battery life. So, I put my HP to rest and went with this, the Asus ul50ag-A2. This particular model is great! The battery claims are correct. I have been getting easily 8 to 9 hours worth of battery life and I could get even better if I wanted to keep tinkering with the power settings. The ultra-low voltage processor runs just fine, fast enough for me!The quality of this laptop is awesome. It feels very sturdy and well-made. It looks very sleek. All black with a black brushed aluminum finish, LED screen, blue lights, and a very cool "smart-pad" mouse that blends right in with the rest of the computer. I especially love the way the smart-pad works, very much like the mouse on a Macbook, with two-finger scrolling and three-finger tapping that can be used as the right-click function (don't worry, there is also a button for right and left-clicking). So far, I have not had any problems with overheating, but the computer is still relatively new to me (the ice cool palm rest also helps). I also would like to point out that the computer is thin and light. It fits in my book-filled backpack and does not add much more weight at all. I feel safe saying that this is the best laptop I have purchased yet and I will continue to use Asus in the near future. It is easily comparable to computers in the 1000 dollar plus range.
I did not give it 5 stars because I think it is a little slow for a brand new computer. I do not like Windows8. but the computer itself is nice, sleek, and shiny. It is very light weight.
