My first taste of good notebooks, and my first taste of thin and light was with my Acer Aspire Timeline X 3820TG, which I feel was essentially the precursor to the Ultrabook. Extremely slim (for it's time), packed with a Core i5, loads of RAM and storage, a switchable GPU for extra performance, lots of connectivity, and an absolutely killer battery life for the time, it was a mobile workhorse and carried me handily through my 2nd year in college with lots of back and forth travelling. I fondly remember using it all day in class un-tethered from the wall running virtual machines, web browsing, writing, only to hop on the bus and blog for an hour during my weekend trips back and forth to Amherst. I'd get home to Amherst and connect it to an HDMI monitor and a wireless mouse, and it was like I never left my rig at my apartment.
Of course, with notebooks from that era (2010! Six years ago!) build quality, although pretty alright, was mostly plastic. Only business models like Thinkpads, or Apple products like the Macbook Pro were built to any extremely high standard. The Timeline was falling apart by the end of it's life in 2014. Had it still been in my hands at the time, it may have lasted longer, but that's in the past now. What we do see, and thanks to the Macbook Air, is a big push for higher quality, thin and light devices, all backed by Intel and their Ultrabook format. I decided in 2016, I wanted to finally get a notebook that would meet my needs for a high quality travel companion. My requirements are below:
Good screen: 13.3" or lower IPS LCD screen, 1920x1080 minimum.
Thin and light: Under 2cm thick.
Good build quality: Aluminum unibody, or very high quality plastic build.
Good keyboard: Typing shouldn't be a chore.
Adequate daily performance: It doesn't need to be a monster, but being able to handle my workload is a must.
Killer battery life: Seriously, I want that feeling the Timeline X gave me.
The choices very much came down to the Dell XPS 13 Skylake Edition, a loaded Thinkpad x260, or the above pictured device, the Asus UX305CA. I went with the Asus.
13.3" 1920x1080 matte IPS LCD
Intel Core M3-6y30 @0.9GHz
8GB DDR3 1866MHz
256GB SSD
Intel dual band 7265 AC wireless
3x USB3.0, MicroHDMI, SD card slot, combo headphone jack
45 Wh battery
Build quality is extremely good. The device is 12.3mm at it's thickest point, and constructed of aluminum. This makes it less thick than the 12 inch Macbook! It's not quite as light however, weighing in at 2.6 pounds. There's no real flex in the keyboard tray, or on the screen, and when open the screen doesn't wobble. It's amazing what 6 years can do for differences in build quality and engineering. The Aluminum build also helps a lot with heat dissipation, which is necessary because this is a fanless computer. For usability, the keyboard has a surprising amount of key travel for such a thin device, but there is no backlighting. This isn't a dealbreaker for me, so I won't complain too much about it. The layout of my model is the bilingual version, so it is a bit different than my keyboard at home, but I'm used to it. The trackpad is large and responsive, but they clicks can be a bit loud. Not a dealbreaker though.
For performance, the Core M3-6y30 is a device designed for low TDP devices like tablets and fanless notebooks. You may think this automatically makes this device slower than a ULV CPU or a regular CPU, but it's surprisingly zippy! From my research, it's not that far off burst performance wise from current generation Skylake ULV CPUs, which is helped along by the fact that this is a hyperthreaded dual core with a 2GHz turbo. Considering the aluminum build is great for heat dissipation, extended operation at 2GHz isn't an issue. I would easily put this on par with the Timeline X I had performance wise daily, but with the added benefit of solid state storage and more RAM. I won't lie, I was skeptical going into this, but spending some time doing my daily stuff such as installing and running virtual machines, web browsing, listening to music, and even playing some games (AOEII HD and Minecraft) I can say I've been very pleased with the performance overall! I still have some stuff to try out like basic photo editing, but I'm confident this is going to handle any mobile blogging needs necessary.
The screen is very impressive. The UX305CA also has a QHD touchscreen flavor, but the hit on battery life and system performance wasn't worth it in my opinion. On top of that, the matte screen on the 1920x1080 model makes this pretty usable outdoors too! Color accuracy should be good considering the IPS display, and although not professionally measured, I can say nothing looks off. Viewing angles are great as expected too. The adaptive brightness does a good job regulating, and maximum brightness is pretty eye-searing which should be awesome if I do any outdoor work with it. I find 1920x1080 on a 13" screen is a bit much at 100% scaling, but I did find that 125% was readable while still feeling like it was displaying a lot of information. 150% felt a bit too cramped in comparison. UI scaling in Windows has a ways to go, but it's mainly developers coding static UIs. At 125%, there are some applications that look fuzzy, but I can live with it. Anything I tend to use daily looks great.
For battery life, after testing for a few weeks, depending on workload, I can expect anywhere from 6-11 hours on a single charge. If I'm just browsing the web in bed, it's closer to 11 hours, where if I'm actually doing something like playing games or working with virtual machines, or watching a lot of YouTube, it's closer to 6 hours. This is still very much on par and even exceeding my Timeline X's battery performance. I'd love to see even longer battery life, but heck, the thing has a larger screen and still has better battery life than my tablet! Color me impressed.
If I was to list a weakness of the thing, it'd probably be the speakers. They're not horrible, but they're downward firing and a bit uninspiring. They're loud enough to fill a small room, but don't expect any real depth or richness from them, although clarity is on point. I would have also loved to see the M7-6Y75 model more actively available with my current configuration, but the M3-6Y30 is still plenty fast for my use case.
For accessories, I grabbed an MX Anywhere 2 from Logitech. I used to have a VX Revolution, but I recently discovered it's dead. I did what I could to clean the battery leads, and I even opened it up to ensure everything was connected correctly and there was no corrosion on any of the cables, but alas, it just would not power up. The MX Anywhere 2 drops a few buttons, and there's no middle click, but it does offer what I want in a mouse: Hyperscroll, side scrolling, forward and back mouse buttons, USB rechargeable, and a Bluetooth connectivity option. I've been pleased with the performance of the MX Anywhere 2, however my unit does have a defect. To switch between regular and hyperscrolling, you need to press down on the scroll wheel. This doesn't work 50% of the time, and requires fiddling with the wheel to get it to function. I would have liked to replace through Best Buy, but they're currently out of stock. I'll keep my eyes open, and if they don't get any stock anytime soon, I'll just RMA through Logitech, which always had great support in my past dealings with them.
I also ended up grabbing a notebook sleeve, as although the build is robust on the UX305, I'd still like to keep it separated from other things in my backpack. I don't have any current pictures of the sleeve, but I found a Kapsule branded one on sale at the Source which also included a few nice deep zippered pockets on the sides to store stuff like the tablet, mouse, charger, and any extra cables/drives I might need to take along. It's half decent looking too, so I may have photos up eventually.
Overall, this is a fairly impressive thin and light mobile setup that meets my needs for daily use! I'm pretty happy with my choices, and I hope they keep impressing me as I use them further.