ASUS ZenBook 13 Ultra-Slim Laptop, 13.3” Full HD, 8th Gen Intel i5-8250U Processor, 8GB RAM, 256GB M.2 SSD, Backlit Kbd, Fingerprint Reader, Windows 10, Grey, UX330UA-AH55

This laptop is EXACTLY what I was looking for. I needed something that was light, sturdy, portable, fast, and good on battery life.Build:This laptop is sturdy with hardly any flex to be found. The exterior of the laptop is metal and looks quite nice. The inside is a premium grade plastic. The laptop is extremely solid when closes and I have no worries throwing it into my backpack. It is extremely light and hardly noticeable on my back. The keyboard is surprisingly nice to use (I had expected it to be bad, but boy was I wrong).Screen: The 13 inch ultrabook screen size is perfect. I used to have a 17 inch display but I do not miss it after having the portability of the 13. I do not have any trouble reading the display. The display gets plenty bright for me in nearly every condition. It is sharp and just all around good looking.Battery: This batter lasts far longer than I ever expected it to. Even on the highest performance settings, I can expect it to last about 4 hours. By turning down the brightness of the keyboard and screen, I can get easily over 9 hours of continuous use of of this thing.Speed: Make sure to get the Intel 8th gen chip. Do not settle for the 7th gen or anything less. The 8th is at least a 40% improvement over the 7 and it shows. This thing is lightning fast. It holds many chrome tabs and programs with ease. I have absolutely no problems with the speed of this device (and I am very picky).Price: Anything cheaper than this will have a significant drop in reliability and build quality. You can get other laptops for cheaper, but I wouldn't. After examining many of its competitors (Dell XPS 13, HP Envy, etc.), I can truly say that this is the best value. Other well known ultrabooks do a fantastic job and may improve slightly over this device, but it will come at a much greater cost.Gaming: Extremely light gaming is doable on this laptop but that is definitely not it's intended purpose. If you expect this to be your main computer as a gamer, you should look elsewhere. Ultrabooks just aren't made for that. You will still need to invest in something with a dedicated graphics card and an i7. I use this laptop when I am away from my gaming desktop.

The ASUS Zenbook ux330ua(8th gen) is an excellent value. As a CS graduate student, I needed something that could handle a heavy coding workload while still being portable enough to bring to class and not break the bank. This fit the bill perfectly, and I highly recommend it to students or anyone who wants a premium ultrabook experience at a budget-friendly price.Display 5/5:This is one the best displays you will find on a device under $1000. 100% sRGB coverage is a must have for me. As someone who does a moderate amount of graphics coding and web design, I need to know the colors on my screen are accurate. For those who don't use this device for content creation, you will still enjoy the vivid colors, respectable black levels, and sharp 1080p resolution. The matte display also prevents distracting reflections. Note: There was no noticable backlight bleeding on my unit. It's there if you look for it, but you would be hard pressed to notice it in any real use case scenario. This is not a fault of ASUS as this is typical for IPS displays in general. I also did not have any dead pixels.Keyboard 4/5:The keyboard is respectable if not remarkable. The keys have good travel but are slightly mushy. My unit will sometimes fail to detect when keys are pressed near their corners. The layout is fine, and the half height arrow keys are surprisingly very usable. This keyboard will not remind you of a ThinkPad, but it will get the job done and has held up well to my coding sessions.Audio 5/5:The audio is excellent for a an ultrabook in this price range. It probably won't fill a large conference room, but the built-in speakers are perfect for online lecture videos or the occasional Amazon Prime video.Build Quality 4/5:This device can't quite hold up to the industry leaders like the Surface Laptop, MacBook, ThinkPad, or XPS products. However, those devices are in other price category entirely. At the current price, it certainly outshines the competition, namely the Acer Swift. The chassis is lightweight, and the spun aluminum finish is a beautiful touch. There is a small amount of flex around the keyboard and screen areas. However, I wouldn't consider it to be durability concern.Battery Life 5/5:The battery life was a major selling pont for me. I am getting 8-10 hours depending on usage. As a student on the go, being able to work all day on one charge is a game changer and should be industry standard by now.Performance 5/5:The quad core Intel i5 8250u processor has excellent performance and represents a huge jump from the previous generation's dual core. Pairing this CPU with 8GB of ram and a 256GB SSD, this device will remain a solid performer for years to come. I can easily run a Linux VM to do any work I can't do on Windows. and the performance is superb. The graphics processor is an integrated Intel UHD 620. While this won't be suitable for any heavy gaming, it is perfectly suited for light graphics work, video watching, and displaying to external monitors. You can even play some older or less demanding video games at respectable settings(CounterStrike: GO, Half-Life 2, etc.).Overall 5/5:This is an excellent ultrabook for those on a budget. If you are still reading at this point, there is a good chance you should go ahead and buy this product. You won't be disappointed. For those with a bit more wiggle room in their budget, take a look at the Zenbook ux410 and ux430. Those devices manage to fit a 14" screen in the same chassis by using smaller bezels around the display.Additional Comments:This device is highly compatable with Linux. I have had no issues with any distro I have tried. I can confirm it works flawlessly with Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, and with elementaryOS 0.4.

This is really my backup/travel computer. I have a high-end model that I do not like to take on the road. I purchased this model to fill in that gap. It has virtually everything I need. Backlit. Light. Good graphics. I don't game with it, so I can't speak to gaming. I only gave it 4 stars for a couple of reasons. 1) The on-off key is located on the upper right of the keyboard, right next to the DELETE key. I can't say how many times I've gone to delete something and accidentally turned off the machine. 2) The ARROW keys are in a funky arrangement, and they are inappropriately sized.Update: May 2019. It's been two years since the purchase. I actually dropped the laptop about 4 feet, onto a concrete surface, twice. Once in 2018 and then two days ago. In the same place, separated by one year in time. The laptop still functions quite well. I have to say, I am impressed with it's durability and robustness.All in all though, I like the machine. Since I keep everything on a cloud anyway, I'm not too concerned if this dies. But it's been very reliable. It starts incredibly fast. Some features are much better than my Yoga. No touch-screen though. But that would have added some serious $$ to the price.

UPDATED REVIEW: So I've owned this laptop for about a year now, and I'd like to add a few more details about my experience with it after so long, as most reviews are given after a few days or weeks and I thought this would be helpful. Specifically I want to talk about a couple of cons I've come across. The two biggest issues I've had with the machine so far have just been Windows 10 breaking down and not due to the Zenbook's actual hardware, so I won't go into detail about that. However, I've still had some more minor issues with the laptop itself.The first thing I noticed was that the bezel's ever-so-slight separation and overlap of the screen sometimes traps tufts of things, at the bottom near the Asus logo. This isn't something that's worsened over time, it's just part of the build like most laptops. But it's just separated enough that it sometimes catches pieces of hair or lint that are visible and hard to pull out. You can get your fingernail in or jam a credit card in between the screen and aluminum if you wanted (wouldn't recommend). The next thing is the track pad. It works just fine 95% of the time, but if you try to two-finger scroll too fast it'll just stop working, although the other functions are still intact. The pad starts working normally if you give it a ten-second break or so and do your scrolling at a medium to slow speed. And the location of the power button on the keyboard isn't ideal. I've accidentally hit it while aiming for the backspace button a few times. Not fun. And as some other reviewers have mentioned, when the fans start going on this laptop you can sometimes hear this little clicking, like the fan is rattling something. It's not present frequently enough for it to be a deal-breaker issue for me, though.I'm still pretty happy with my purchase overall, although as time has gone on I've regretted not getting something with a touchscreen. I intend to upgrade to another laptop in the coming months and selling this one. Would still recommend this laptop for its price range.ORIGINAL REVIEW: Let me start by saying that I love this laptop, especially for the price. Maybe I'm overly impressed considering my last one was, while sturdy, about as functional as a plastic toaster from the early 2000s, but I digress. I'm giving this Asus five stars within the context of its price range, and having owned it for five months, so settle yourselves in for a chunky review.This laptop is hella thin. It's about the size of one of those expensive, medium-sized sketchbooks with only twenty pages in it, and it weighs almost nothing. It's super portable, and quiet in my experience though other reviewers have said otherwise, and the battery life is pretty good. It claims twelve hours and while it's never lasted that long yet, I've gotten to ten thus far. The display is pretty nice too, with an impressively crisp resolution, bold colours, and it has a matte finish which makes it easier on the eyes and doesn't reflect what's behind you (which I find most laptops I've seen do).It has three different USB ports which have all served me fine, and a headphone jack. I don't usually use the speakers so I can't say whether they're better or worse than anything else on the market. The keys are easy to spend lots of time typing on without ever becoming uncomfortable or clunky. I'm really happy it has a fingerprint reader as well, which I first thought was gimmicky but I use it almost exclusively now. There is no CD player for those who still use CDs on their laptop, but I am not one of those people.The contender against this Zenbook was the Macbook Air. I chose this one over it because it had the newer core processor, bigger storage, and could be opened up at the bottom without a technician if any issues were to arise – all for less money. Not to diss Apple, but every Macbook I've seen has that ultra-glossy screen and matte body which both seem to get really filthy, and this laptop has so far been easy to keep clean. The spun-metal aluminum of the Zenbook's exterior is also a finish I happen to enjoy.I wish I could brag about how fast this laptop's internet connection is, but I can't because the internet signal by default is absolute crap where I live in ye rural Canada. It's otherwise pretty fast to respond, and has faster internet compared to what I had prior. It boots up in just a few seconds which I appreciate.I have experienced only one issue with the laptop where the fingerprint scanner stopped working after a Windows 10 update. The computer seemed to have forgotten it had a fingerprint reader altogether, and I was unable to find a solution to fix this. Thankfully, a week or two later another Windows update came by and the problem disappeared. The only other small nitpick I have would be when the laptop is charging – the little orange light on the side will turn green when the battery is full, but the desktop itself when turned on will often still say 99% or one minute to full charge remaining.All in all, this Asus blows my previous five-hundred bucker wonderbread laptop out of the water. I guess this one is technically still an “economy level” computer being only $1000, but I personally think it was well worth what I paid. Would recommend.

I have received my first unit however it does not power on. Asus support advised me to exchange it so I am currently in the process of doing so. The notebook had also clearly been used or at least opened previously as the box was packaged very sloppy and there were smears on the display. Will update once I get a unit that works.UPDATE:Since I originally wrote this review I have been in touch with amazon and it is believed that whoever returned the unit I got the first time did not flag it as defective so the defective unit was sent to me, Luckily amazon has some pretty great customer service and we were able to return my first unit and get the new one with in a week. I have been using the notebook for a few days now and have been enjoying pretty much everything I was looking for in a laptop. However it does lose one star as the fan is rather load even when doing some fairly basic tasks, but I was aware of this before I purchased and I think it is still well worth it, this is the cheapest ultrabook you can find thats below 1000 CAD. I would still highly recommend this if your looking for a thin, light, and well built notebook..

This is my 3rd ASUS laptop. I keep buying them because they are, in my view, the best all-purpose laptops out there. Lightweight, perfect for travel, extremely reliable and fast - this laptop is an incredible value for the price. Love the anti-glare screen (needed because I have sensitive eyes). The laptop arrived super fast but because of annoying Windows 10 updates, it was a few hours before I was able to actually use the machine. Despite complaints from others, my laptop runs very quietly. And although some reviews recommend this laptop only for "light" video editing, I have already done extensive editing and video rendering without any issues at all. My only complaint is the small 250 GB hard drive, but understandable at this price point. Be sure to carry plenty of external storage and you'll be in great shape with this amazing laptop.

Good all-round business/home machine. There is enough speed and power for my usage and it's easy to carry on business trips. I wish it was touch screen but the back-lit keyboard was a bigger priority. I understand what people mean with the soggy touch pad as it gets a bit of getting used to. Lets hope the screen hinge lasts longer than my last ASUS did which crapped out on me at about 18 months - but I was admittedly hard on it.

This is a great value for money Laptop.Not as elegant as some laptops ( but they are more expensive), and the bezel edges are a little larger than I would like. Apart from these minor things, it is a great laptop.Fast, reliable. Thin and lightweight. Does everything I need. Fast processing, with long battery life, ( compared to laptops I've had in the past). Would recommend