Prising the Asus U20A out of its box, I was immediately taken by its glossy
coat. If the U20A were a black Labrador, I would swear it had been fed on
Pedigree Chum.
Yet what works for dogs does not always do it for laptops. A glossy case is a
double-edged sword. When you first take it out of the box it looks lovely;
so lovely that you want to stroke it. Oops. Where did those smeared finger
trails come from? If you don’t mind giving it a polish every now and then,
you will be fine.
The quality of the casing is a little harder to overlook. Smooth lines are
everything for a laptop, particularly one that goes down the glossy route.
However, the edge of the screen feels like that rough plastic you get on an
Airfix model before you sand it down. It felt rough enough to snag a hole in
the jumper of a passer-by.
The screen itself is a nice widescreen 12.1 inch affair but it continues the
glossy look of the casing. Glossy is nice to look at but as soon as you are
in tough lighting conditions, there is glare to handle. Still, a test
involving streaming HD video looked pretty slick despite a few blocky screen
artefacts.
The U20a comes with what the Americans call a “chiclet” keyboard, named after
the rounded square lozenges of chewing gum of that name available widely in
the US. It’s the same sort of keyboard that now comes with the Macbook Pro
following its rebuild with an aluminium casing.
However, the U20a’s chiclet keyboard is not quite of the standard of the
Macbook Pro’s and has a worrying amount of give in the keys, making typing
less satisfying.
There has been a trend in the last year for the addition of fancy lighting
effects to laptops – glowing power switches and so on. The U20 takes this to
new level with an underlit keyboard and a sparkling touchpad that would not
look out of place on Liberace’s laptop (were he still alive, naturally).
But that’s not all. The U20A also monitors the ambient lighting and increase
the brightness of these lights and also of the display if you are using it
in the dark.
As well as having some fancy lights, the touchpad also allows the use of
gestures - pinching and spreading to zoom in and out, dragging two fingers
to scroll and pushing and pulling three fingers to switch between windows
and the desktop.
My review model was powered by an Intel SU2700 but most models on sale in the
UK seem to have the faster 1.4GHz SU3500 powering them. Intel has designed
these chips to extend battery life. Mine came with a 4400mAh battery which
lasted around three hours in power saving mode with several power-hungry
applications running.
One very handy feature for a business traveller is Express Gate. Express Gate
is like a mini operating system which lets the laptop do a mini boot-up in
eight seconds giving you access to a number of key applications, such as a
web browser and instant messaging, without having to wait for Windows to
load fully.
It sounds quite gimmicky but if you are dashing for a plane and suddenly
remember you need to send an email before boarding, this is a quick way of
doing it without having to go through the full boot-up process (which
continues in the background).
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