Asus ZenBook UX305CA Review: Thin And Light, Great Battery Life
User Experience and Software
As we mentioned earlier, the Asus ZenBook UX305CA has an aluminum chassis that makes the ultrabook feel surprisingly sturdy, given its slim form. The body doesn’t flex when you hold it and minor bumps didn’t damage the exterior (or the interior, for that matter).
The keyboard keys are spaced far enough apart to accommodate most fingers, but the keyboard vibrates a little during typing. The resulting noise isn’t loud and wouldn’t bother someone who uses the keyboard mostly to type search terms or short messages on social media, but it might annoy people who plan to spend much of the day typing.
The touchpad is extremely responsive to swipes and taps. The touch pad also acts as left and right mouse buttons, which provide a little more resistance than we like from laptop touchpads, but not enough to bother most users.
The speakers are loud enough to handle typical use. You can hear audio fine while streaming a video as long as you’re sitting reasonably close to the ultrabook. That said, the system is definitely quieter than some of the larger laptops we’ve recently reviewed thanks to the low-powered Core M and the fact that there are no moving parts in the system.
The Asus ZenBook UX305CA has very few pre-installed programs. Asus added CyberLink PhotoDirector 5 and PowerDirector 12, both of which are useful programs, and then relegated the rest of the extras into the Asus GiftBox, keeping the Windows 10 programs panel mercifully clean.
CyberLink PowerDirector and PhotoDirector are solid video- and photo-editing tools. They are light editions, but are great for amateurs and have plenty of tools for customizing your videos or photos. PowerDirector has a voice-over recording feature, for example, and some basic audio mixing capabilities. PhotoDirector 5 has the occasional ad for PhotoDirector 7, but that’s a small price to pay for solid, otherwise-free photo-editing software.
CyberLink PhotoDirector
Asus Gift Box
Asus GiftBox boils down to a digital catalog. There are icons for the likes of Evernote and TripAdvisor, and clicking one opens the Microsoft Store or Microsoft Edge, depending on whether it leads to an app or a website. Asus also links to a few of its own apps, like Asus LifeCam (a handy webcam utility) and WebStorage, as well as a trial of McAfee’s LifeSafe software.
The keyboard keys are spaced far enough apart to accommodate most fingers, but the keyboard vibrates a little during typing. The resulting noise isn’t loud and wouldn’t bother someone who uses the keyboard mostly to type search terms or short messages on social media, but it might annoy people who plan to spend much of the day typing.
The touchpad is extremely responsive to swipes and taps. The touch pad also acts as left and right mouse buttons, which provide a little more resistance than we like from laptop touchpads, but not enough to bother most users.
The speakers are loud enough to handle typical use. You can hear audio fine while streaming a video as long as you’re sitting reasonably close to the ultrabook. That said, the system is definitely quieter than some of the larger laptops we’ve recently reviewed thanks to the low-powered Core M and the fact that there are no moving parts in the system.
The Asus ZenBook UX305CA has very few pre-installed programs. Asus added CyberLink PhotoDirector 5 and PowerDirector 12, both of which are useful programs, and then relegated the rest of the extras into the Asus GiftBox, keeping the Windows 10 programs panel mercifully clean.
CyberLink PowerDirector and PhotoDirector are solid video- and photo-editing tools. They are light editions, but are great for amateurs and have plenty of tools for customizing your videos or photos. PowerDirector has a voice-over recording feature, for example, and some basic audio mixing capabilities. PhotoDirector 5 has the occasional ad for PhotoDirector 7, but that’s a small price to pay for solid, otherwise-free photo-editing software.
CyberLink PhotoDirector
Asus Gift Box
Asus GiftBox boils down to a digital catalog. There are icons for the likes of Evernote and TripAdvisor, and clicking one opens the Microsoft Store or Microsoft Edge, depending on whether it leads to an app or a website. Asus also links to a few of its own apps, like Asus LifeCam (a handy webcam utility) and WebStorage, as well as a trial of McAfee’s LifeSafe software.
