The IT Nerd

Here’s the deal with the Asus ZenBook UX306. It’s mission is to undercut Apple MacBooks more-premium ultraportables by offering a powerful Core i7 CPU, a spacious 512GB SSD and a colorful 1080p display, all for a very aggressive price. Does it deliver? Well, it mostly does. 

Made of aluminum, it’s sleek and only weighs 2.8 pounds which is in line with what it is competing against. Ports wise, you get a USB 3.0 port, headphone/mic combo jack and an SD card slot on the left. The right side is where you’ll find the micro HDMI port, USB Type-C port and a power jack. But one area where the ZenBook UX306U shines is the 13″ display. The 1080p display that they put in this thing is bright and vivid and I guarantee that you will not complain about the image quality. 

Now onto the keyboard and trackpad. I had no problems with either. The feedback on the keyboard was good for a me as I am a touch typist who relies on that, and the trackpad was big enough that I felt comfortable using it. The speakers are good based on playing a variety of music on them and they are loud enough that you don’t need external speakers if you were to use the ZenBook UX306U for presentations.

The ZenBook UX306 comes with a 2.5-GHz Intel Core i7-6500U CPU, 8GB of RAM a 512GB SSD and 802.11ac WiFi. It also comes out of the box with Windows 10 and it performed well. Almost anything that I tossed at it, was dealt with well. However, it has an Intel Integrated HD graphics chipset. It’s fine for running Microsoft Word. But if you want to play Overwatch, Asus has some ROG laptops that they’d likely suggest that you look at instead. Battery life is another strong point as I got over 10 hours of life while using it. The only thing that sort of let the side down was the webcam. It’s a 720p webcam that didn’t have the sharpest detail when compared to other portables that I have seen with 720p webcams. If it were not for that, I would have nothing to complain about. 

What doesn’t let the side down is the price which is $1399 CAD. And you get a sleeve to carry it in as part of the deal. That’s a bonus. In short, you get a more powerful laptop for much less cash than Apple MacBooks more-premium ultraportables. Asus in the form of the ZenBook UX306 has an almost perfect offering that I am sure will get a lot of attention from those who are looking for something in this class of portable.

This entry was posted on September 9, 2016 at 7:59 pm and is filed under Products with tags Asus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.