Why You Can Trust CNET Asus U80V review: Asus U80V
The U80V is without question our favourite 14-inch laptop, and Asus deserves praise for what it has achieved here. If the company can overcome the final stumbling block of having a reliable multi-touch touchpad on PC, we'll be thoroughly impressed indeed.
Design
Coated in piano black, with extremely deep set, blue reflective particles and with trims of silver, the new Asus U series manages to evoke a sensation of stylishness right out of the box.
Asus U80V
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Opening to the inside, you'd swear you were presented with the PC equivalent of the MacBook. Chiclet-style keys, a backlit keyboard and a multi-touch touchpad with lights that follow the touch of your finger are the orders of the day. A single sensor on the left adjusts the brightness of the screen dynamically depending on the environment you're in, as well as auto-switching off the keyboard backlight when things get bright enough. Unlike the MacBook, the user has control over the brightness, able to set three different levels, or switch it off entirely.
The 14-inch glossy, 1366x768 screen is attached to a circular hinge, meaning no ports are on the back — only the front and sides. An air vent sits on the left-hand side, meaning left handed external mouse users may feel a warm breeze during use.
Features
The multi-touch touchpad is one of the best we've used on the PC, but still doesn't come close to the slickness and reliability of the Apple equivalent. Just like the Apple, dragging two fingers up, down, left or right scrolls the screen; pinching the fingers zooms in and out; and holding down one finger and moving another in a semi-circle motion rotates images. Where it differs is in the tapping — by default tapping with three fingers acts as a right mouse button, while tapping with two produces a middle click. Swiping three fingers down quickly opens the task manager, tapping three fingers then double tapping with the third opens a magnifier, and swiping left or right with three fingers will function as page up or page down.
Sadly, the only motions that really act reliably is the two-finger scrolling and the two-finger tap. The three-finger motions often get jumbled and do something opposite to what you were expecting, or perform the two-finger actions. Rotating often gets confused with zooming. Ultimately, you'll end up using the two-finger scrolling a lot, and likely change the two-finger tap to right-click. Or you could simply use the supplied single mould mouse button. Either way, once you've gone multi-touch it's hard to return to the old scroll-zones way of thinking.
Three USB ports are present, as is gigabit Ethernet, VGA and HDMI ports, headphone and microphone jacks, an Express Card 34 slot, SD card reader and a DVD+-RW drive. Oddly missing from the U80V is an eSATA port, something Asus has championed since the beginning — presumably this is down to the size of the laptop, as the larger U50 includes one.
Performance
Internally, the U80V includes an Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 @ 2.53GHz, 2GB RAM, a 500GB hard drive and an ATI Radeon HD 4570, all running on Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit. This lead to some moderate performance in the benchmark stakes, scoring 2615 in 3DMark06 and 2918 in PCMark05, making it suitable both for light gaming and productivity work. With all power-saving features turned off, screen brightness and volume set to maximum and an Xvid file played back at full screen the laptop battery lasted two hours, 51 minutes. This is a worst-case scenario — during light office work and internet browsing expect it to last significantly longer.
The U80V is without question our favourite 14-inch laptop, and Asus deserves praise for what it has achieved here. If the company can overcome the final stumbling block of having a reliable multi-touch touchpad on PC, we'll be thoroughly impressed indeed.