It’s not going to be possible to get a full review of the ASUS UX31 together as unfortunately I’ll be returning it tomorrow to exchange it for a Toshiba Z830 and settling on that for my work at CES, Mobile World Congress and probably CeBIT in March. It has been a tough decision but it’s time to bite the bullet and get to work. Before I do thought, let me tell you what I have learnt about the UX31 in the last 4 days.
From the day that the Acer Aspire S3 was launched everyone knew that it would be coming in as a ‘value’ option in the Ultrabook field. We’ve tested it extensively over the last week and can say that it’s not only a ‘value’ option offering Core i5 performance where others in the price category are only offering capped Core i3, but it’s also an honest Ultrabook too. It doesn’t show-off, doesn’t have any outstanding features but it does everything well. From screen to keyboard to performance and battery life it works well as an all-round 1.3KG 13” Ultrabook. Read on for our full review of the Acer Aspire S3 320GB HDD, Core i5 Ultrabook. (Model MS2346 with Finnish keyboard layout being tested here.)
We had a monster session with three Ultrabooks this evening. Thanks to all that joined and contributed.
The live videos are available below.
There’s an hour of videos here but they are split into, hopefuly, bite-sized secitions. As usual, the quality isn’t high becuase they are recorded from the live stream but there’s a ton of information in there.
Update: Session is over. Videos of the session are available here.
Link to Live Video and Chat: Ultrabooknews.com/live
Tonight: Acer S3 (Core i5), Asus UX31 (Core i7), Toshiba Z830 (Core i7)
Join for Chat, Video and some fun. Bring your favourite tipple because it’s the last live session of the year.
Start: 2100 CET (Berlin – Your Timezone listed here) Duration: 2.5hrs. Agenda below.
Sorry. The Session is over but you can already view some videos of the event at Ustream. These videos will be going up to YouTube….
Update: Videos now available on YouTube. See this playlist.
We’re Live at 2000 CET (Berlin.) Ultrabook News Update, Q&A, Samsung 900X1B Review.
Location: Ultrabooknews.com/live
Time: Your timezone details here.
Agenda:
You can tune in, ask questions and steer the testing on Saturday 3rd Dec at 2100 MEZ/CET (Your timezone details here.) I’ll be live for about 2 hours so please, drop in and join-in on Ultrabooknews.com/live . Follow@ultrabooknews on Twitter for reminders.
Some parts of the show will be recorded.
I want to publicly thank Morgan, @morganmobile who’s just packaged up an Acer S3 and shipped it off from Finland to us here in Germany. Who needs PR people when you’ve got contacts like that! He’s been busy testing a number of solutions and I plan to get his thoughts here in text soon.
We’ll be running the Samsun 900X1B live review on Saturday [details here] and finalizing a written review over the next 3 or 4 days. After that we’ll be getting it together with the Acer S3 for a week. I’ll let you all know about the live session for that.
Once the S3 is out the way we should be lined-up with the Toshiba Z830. I know a lot of you have been waiting for a review of that so my apologies about the delay. It’s expected within the next 2 weeks. As for the Lenovo U300S, I’m working on it. [Any Lenovo PR people out there?]
It’s going to be a busy few weeks…but fun!
Thanks to everyone that joined in the live testing session yesterday evening. It was totally worth the effort because we uncovered a few more nuggets of information and a lot of data on gaming as well as confirming battery life and performance. The videos are embedded at the bottom of this article.
The bad news first. During the evening we experienced two power-downs on removing / inserting the power plug while we were in a game. It was an instant-off situation [see it on the live video here.]. Apparently others have experienced this too. I testing today, I experienced an instant shut-off while World Of Warcraft was loading (on battery mode.)
Our first ‘retail’ Ultrabook review video is now live. It’s the Asus UX21. Thanks, ASUS Germany, for sending it over.
You can read a few very early first impressions on the previous article. Specifications, as always, in our database.
Our LIVE REVIEW is planned for Thursday 17th November at 2100 GMT+1 (9pm Berlin time- meet everyone here. Your local time here.) so if you have queries and want to see the results live, add it to your calendar. We’ll have a live chat and video going for a few hours. The ASUS UX21 will get a good thrashing with benchmarks, videos, productivity, gaming and much more.
A more detailed first impressions article will go out within the next 48hrs. Check back here or subscribe on Twitter or Facebook.
And now to the video. Don’t forget to support Ultrabooknews by ‘liking’ the YouTube video and please, if you have a positive or negative thought, add it to the comments. It helps us all.
Video below….
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