Asus VivoBook V551LB-DB71T falls short of excellent

Hey, there. I'm Josh Goldman with CNET. And if you're in the market for a sleek and slim Windows 8 laptop for around $1,000, here's the Asus VivoBook V551LB-DB71T. It's a 15.6-inch laptop, so it's not ultra-portable. And its travel weight is about 6 pounds. However, it is less than an inch thick, so it is thin, but not so light. The lid in keyboard surrounding palm rest are metal, changing over to plastic on the bottom. But the design remains clean with a nice overall solid feel. Opening it up, you get a look at perhaps its biggest downside, its screen. Now, its touch response is very good, and the best about it, really, but the pedestrian 1366x768 resolution is disappointing at this price. Plus, it doesn't get very bright and the face is so high-glare, it can be difficult to see in well-lit rooms or in daylight. Moving on below, the keyboard is nice and comfortable, and the multi-touch click pad is responsive without being jumpy. The keyboard's not backlit, though-- which again, for $1,000 we kind of expect at this point. Now, inside, you'll find a 4th gen Core i7 processor, 8 gigs of memory, discrete midrange and video graphics, and a 1-terabyte hard drive. Not having a Solid State Drive or even a hybrid drive brings down its performance some. But the processor and graphics combo are solid for day-to-day tasks and gaming at reduced settings. And battery life on our video playback test lasted 6 hours and 20 minutes. All in all, it's a very good laptop, but lacks a few things that would make it excellent for the money. I'm Josh Goldman, and that's a look at the Asus VivoBook V551LB.