List Price: $569.99
Sale Price: $457.99
Today's Bonus: 20% Off
For roughly 550.00 this can hardly be beat for a small laptop that has windows 8 and a touchscreen. At first I was a little aggravated with the touch pad but, I installed the drivers from Samsung's website that are supposed to be for a series 5 laptop. This laptop along with several others have the same Elan touch pad in them. Once you install this driver it is a night and day difference in the touchpad.
The link for the drivers is in the first comment. Amazon won't let you link to an external website in the main review.
So go to the comment and get to the link then follow what is below.
You then need to click on the Manuals and Downloads link, then click Driver.
After that scroll down and click on the ZIP link for the Touch Pad driver 11.7.2.1
If you have the sorry Asus Smart Gesture installed, uninstall that first and reboot, then install this software. I have had various Macbooks for the better part of the last 7 years and this is my first PC laptop in a while. I was almost ready to return this laptop until I found these drivers. I would say the touch pad is 95% of a Macbook touch pad now and whether you like Apple or not, you have to admit they know what they are doing when it comes to track pads. Aside from all of that I'm extremely happy with the operation of this laptop now.
I am coming from a laptop that had an SSD drive in it so it does seem a little slow in some areas but, others it is working just fine. I have an extra SSD drive that I plan on putting in this machine as well as removing the half height mini PCI atheros wireless/bluetooth combo. I purchased an Intel Centrino 6235anhmw Mini Pci Express Bluetooth 4.0 to replace it with and based on my research I should be able to enable Intel Wireless Display on this laptop after that install. The card only cost me 30.00 bucks and I figured it was worth the gamble to see if it would work. I'll update this review once I get the card in a couple of days to state if it worked or not.
The sound coming from this laptop is actually quite good and I would say better than a lot of the previous laptops I am use to.
The touchscreen is extremely responsive and I haven't had any missed touches or erratic behavior out of it. I have played several touch based games and it worked flawlessly.
Last but, not least this thing is solid, the build quality on it is exceptional for something this cheap.
Okay, now for the bad which again considering this is a cheap laptop with a touchscreen really isn't that bad.
The fan runs constantly and while it is not overly annoying it does seem to run even when not doing much on the system. That is really my main complaint about the machine at this point. The second complaint is that the viewing angles on this machine are pretty poor but, again don't expect any machine at this price point with a touchscreen to have great viewing angles. Although viewing angles are bad, brightness is very good. I think with the brightness turned all the way up you could possibly do permanent damage to your eyes(a joke of course).
The keyboard is a little cramped but, really not all that bad. I would say I have slightly above average hand size but, again it isn't to bad and I'm able to kick out a reasonable speed without to many more mistakes than I usually make. Expect some adjustment if you are coming from a full size keyboard with large hands.
Again, the stock hard drive is a 5400rpm drive and it does seem a little slow for me but, if you are coming from another mechanical drive then you may not really notice it as a problem. I've been using SSD drives for some time so it does bother me a bit.
These might be major problems for others but, for me they are minor annoyances that I can live with on a cheap machine like this. This is basically an 11.6" Macbook Air that is missing the SSD(entry level is 64GB SSD), backlit keyboard, viewing angles aren't as good for the ASUS and fan runs more often than Macbook Air. However the Macbook Air doesn't have these features: touch screen, 500GB HDD that can be upgraded to a small or large SSD if you like and the Air cost about 450.00 more for the entry level. Granted the Macbook Air is considerably lighter but, it also makes your wallet lighter.
Sorry for all of the Macbook comparisons but, I have come from many years of having Macbooks and decided with Windows 8 to give PCs a try again. I'm glad I did.
Update 11/8/2012:
I installed the Intel wireless card I mentioned above, then installed the latest drivers for the card from the Intel website as well as the latest video drivers from the ASUS website. Then I installed the Widi display software and was able to connect to my Belkin Screencast. It took several tries and then it finally updated the software on the Belkin. After that it has been connecting perfectly with no problems. So I paid 40 bucks on Amazon for a refurbished Belkin Screencast and 32.00 for the intel card. Now for 72.00 bucks I'm able to use my 55" HDTV at 1080p as a second screen.
Update 11/14/2012
I finally got around to installing an SSD drive and replacing the mechanical drive. The drive that came in it was a Hitachi HTS5450A7E380 which is a 7mm thick drive. Unfortunately the SSD I had was a typical 9.5mm and was too thick to work at first. Luckily I was able to remove part of the casing on the SSD drive I used and that made for a perfect fit. So if you plan on swapping out for an SSD make sure it is no thicker than 7mm or it won't fit. I had some trouble where the laptop kept booting into the BIOS. when I went in and disabled fast boot as well as turned of drive security or something like that. I can't remember exactly now but, when the option is enabled you can go further into the BIOS and see PKI keys and DDB keys and a lot of other keys. I just disabled that portion and then it started recognizing the hard drive. This may not be a problem if you clone the hard drive to the SSD before you swap but, I did a fresh install. Laptop is blazing fast now as it boots into windows in about 10 seconds.
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