Asus Zenbook 13 (2019) review : Compact yet powerful daily driver.

If you are buying a laptop in 2019 then you must ask for a 12-inch form factor that houses a 13-inch display or a 13-inch form factor with a 14-inch display. The second thing is to make sure that these laptops fit inside not just backpack and the thing to know is that they should be light enough that your back does not ache after carrying them for few hours. Taiwanese company bring it is offering the ZenBook 13 via Flipkart. Here is our review.

Design And Display:

The ZenBook 13 is unlike anything that we have seen in the market till now. When you place the XPS 13 and ZenBook 13 side by side, it feels as if both the laptops are fighting on to who has the thinnest bezels. The ZenBook 13, of course, comes out on top with its NanoEdge display. The ZenBook 13, like most of their Zenebook lineup, is built from a single block of aluminum.

Asus has achieved its slim and lightweight form factor with the help of an unique hinge design called the ErgoLift hinge. The display itself measures 13.3-inches diagonally but has narrow 2.5mm bezels around it, which minimizes the overall chassis area. The hinge raises in such a way that it hides the bottom side of the display bezel, giving a really clean and bezel-free viewing experience. The design is so stealthy that Asus kept the webcam at the top and not at the bottom or on the side.

Display

The ZenBook 13 features a 13.3-inch display with Full HD resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. The display is bright with vibrant colors. With the ZenBook 13, Asus claims to have the lightest 13-inch laptop in the market, which weighs just 1.09 Kg. Honestly, in the backpack, it adds little weight. The ZenBook 13 also offers good choice of ports with one USB 3.1 Type-C port, one USB Type-A port, one USB 2.0 port, one HDMI port, one microSD card slot and an audio combo jack. Only complain for me is that it still uses a barrel-type charging cable when it could have switched to USB-C charging.

Performance And Software:

The laptop also offers the best battery life. During the time, I spent testing the device, which was mostly in the work scenario, the laptop managed to get me through the entire work day. I have seen laptops that give up at around five or six hours but the ZenBook 13 with its 3-cell 50Wh lithium-polymer battery. Asus says it is rated to last up to 14 hours but the most conservative figure is 8 hours.

Our review unit came with 8th generation Intel Core i7-8565U processor, 8GB of RAM, 512GB PCIe SSD storage and NVIDIA GeForce MX150 graphics processor with 2GB of GDDR5 memory. You can throw at complex office files, multiple applications, Microsoft Office, web browsing and anything else that would need a lot of compute memory. During the week spent using the laptop, I did not see any kind of slowdown or snaggy performance. Since there is GeForce MX150 onboard, you can even play games like PUBG and Fortnite at the low resolution. The only problem that I could discern is that the fan runs a bit too high and after a point, the sound starts to annoy you.

Keyboard And Track Pad:

The ZenBook 13 seems so small that one would assume it comes with a shallow keyboard offering very little key travel but it actually ships with a proper keyboard. The keyboard is quite pleasant to type. The only real problem with this keyboard is the shift and function key which are really small and placed on either side of the upper arrow key. It is such a bad implementation that everytime you select something and wish to move the arrow, you end up moving the cursor.

The trackpad comes with an unique feature, the unique element is called NumberPad, which is essentially the trackpad augmenting numerals on top of it. It is a clever way to offer you numeric keypad without having to place it on the keyboard. The feature is activated by by pressing an icon on the trackpad for a second. Asus is among those OEMs which use Windows precision drivers which makes trackpad usage more fluent and easy with gestures as well.

Final Words :

I must say this ZenBook comes with really thin bezel, compact factor and one that won’t break your back. It delivers on areas of performance it is excellent. It is also not the most expensive laptop in this price segment. The ZenBook 13 has unique feature of converting trackpad as NumberPad but it's matter of choice. Since users don't tend to use NumberPad all time. Overall it is a good deal costing you 88,990 INR in Indian market which is fairly ok. It get rating from our end as :