The Asus Zenbook Prime, the Intel Ivy Bridge-flavoured Ultrabook refresh, has crash landed in the UK – with TechRadar on hand to get up and close with the slimline beauty at an event in London.
The Asus Zenbook Prime UX31A, to give it its full meatier moniker, is a 13.3-inch notebook (there is also a 11-inch version – the UX21A), which boasts a mightily impressive Full HD, 1920 x 1080, IPS matte display with an impressive 178 degree viewing angle.
Unfortunately, of the two early pre-production models that Asus had on show, one would only boot as far as the BIOS screen and the other had a damaged screen (with only half the full brightness), which limited the full brilliance of the incredible display.
However, when looking at the working display, we were still blown away by the incredible vibrancy, reaction under terrible lighting, and the extreme viewing angles. Well, as blown away as you can be looking at BIOS information.
What we can say for sure is the Zenbook Prime is an incredibly desirable bit of tech, with its "spun" metal chassis running the MacBook Air close in terms of beauty.
Measuring just under 17mm at its thickest point and just over 11mm at its thinnest, and weighing just 1.3kg, this is about as svelte as it gets in the Ultrabook stakes.
And it has the hardware minerals to back up its classy chassis too – packing a third generation Intel Core i7-3517U CPU clocked at 1.9GHz, or up to 2.4GHz using Turbo Boost.
This is backed up by 4GB of DDR3 1600MHz RAM, Intel HD Graphics 4000 and a 256GB SSD.
There's also a 720p CMOS sensor webcam, a couple of nippy USB 3.0 ports, a micro HDMI option, an SD card reader and a mini VGA port as well.
Throw in audio from Bang & Olufsen, a laser-etched backlit chiclet keyboard, Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, and you've got yourself quite the machine.
It's a shame there's no Ethernet option, but there's no room for fatties at this party. However, if it's anything like the original Zenbook, there'll be an adapter in the box.
No word on an exact launch date yet but, when it does, we're told to expect a price tag around the £1,500 mark. Not cheap, we know – but it's pricey riding around on luxury flagships.
No comments:
Post a Comment