ASUS ZenBook 15 UX533 2018 in Pakistan

Lacking the video touchpad of the ZenBook Pro, the ZenBook is nonetheless a powerful offering with the option to add a dedicated graphics card if you want to do some gaming or photo editing. Prices and release dates for the UK are still TBC – in lieu of a full review, here’s how I got on. The whole ZenBook range is pretty stylish. The first thing to note is the commitment to keeping a high screen-to-body ratio of 92%, which is achieved by the side 3mm bezels. Asus Laptop calls this ‘NanoEdge’, but that’s just really a fancy way of saying ‘a very thin bezel’.

Then there’s something called ‘ErgoLift’, which is not as throwaway a name as it might sound once you realize what it means. The hinges of the ZenBook are shaped in such a way that when you open one, it has the effect of lifting the laptop’s posterior up off of the surface of your desk by an angle of 3 degrees. This sees the keys angled towards your hands at a more gentle angle, which supposedly makes it nicer to type on. Admittedly, I don’t think that I spent enough time typing on the ZenBook 15 to say whether it offers a truly excellent typing experience on par with Dell’s maglev keys, but it felt comfortable enough. More to the point, when I returned to typing on a flat, no-ErgoLifted keyboard, later on, I had to concede that, yeah, maybe Asus’s engineers do have a point here. The trick with the hinge also serves a couple of other purposes. As the back of the ZenBook’s base isn’t emitting heat straight into your desk, it ostensibly has the effect of improving airflow around the laptop’s hot bits.

If that wasn’t enough, Asus claims this feature also ensures that any audio emitted by the downward-pointing Harmon Kardon-certified speakers won’t be immediately absorbed by your desktop. Quite what this means for watching TV in bed is another thing though. Then there are the colors: beautiful deep blue and silver colored cases are complimented nicely by rose gold accents. Weighing 1.59kg, the ZenBook 15 isn’t as light as some of the other skinny laptops we’ve seen at IFA 2018, but it perhaps proves that you can make very swish-looking machines without having to obsessively (and predictably) whittle away a millimeter here, a millimeter there every year.