ASUS Zenbook 14 review: Lean, clean, mean machine!

The ASUS Zenbook line-up manages to walk that fine line between sturdy design and powerful performance. All this is often without the kind of outrageous price tags that many other flagship laptops carry. Today, the brand announced the new ASUS Zenbook 14, which I’ve been using for just over a week. Here’s whether you should consider upgrading to it.

Aesthetics

ASUS continues to keep it minimal, clean and classy with stylised brand lines on the lid. Weighing only about 1.28 kg, the ASUS Zenbook 14 makes for a lightweight, hassle-free companion for both city commuting and longer travels. It’s made entirely out of aluminium alloy and has a sturdy 180-degree hinge for the times you want to show the screen to your friends or colleagues. The laptop is available in two colours — Foggy Silver and Ponder Blue — and I’ve been using the latter.

Display

I’m a big fan of ASUS’ OLED displays and there’s no room for complaint on the 14-inch touchscreen display on this device. It’s a 3K display that offers up to 120 Hz refresh rates. It’s one of those screens that you’d love watching content on, and also creating mixed-media content or even writing articles on. The viewing experience is predictably good with the colours popping onscreen. The sound is loud and clear with the stereo speakers on board, with Dolby Atmos support.

Productivity

The keyboard on the ASUS Zenbook 14 is spacious and well-laid out. The keys offer ample travel and quick snapback, along with a finish that’s nice to touch. I loved writing my articles on the laptop and using it to do my journaling as well at night, thanks to the backlit keyboard.

There are very few brands that offer the functionality that ASUS Zenbooks do with their smart touchpads. The special “virtual” NumberPad 2.0 can be triggered by a long press on the icon on the top right of the trackpad. It comes with its own adjustable brightness settings and also supports smart gestures to tweak media volume and screen brightness, or play and pause a video. The trackpad is also impressively accurate in knowing whether you’re using it to navigate the display or making quick calculations on the digital number pad.

The Zenbook 14’s FHD infrared webcam sports a physical shutter which is great to have for privacy and safety concerns. The quality of videos could still be better though, as anything below perfect lighting makes the videos streamed during webinars and meetings grainy. Face recognition to unlock the device though was, as always, super snappy. The AI noise-cancelling microphone worked well to suppress any background noise and highlight my voice during meetings.

This time around, I hooked up my smartphone to access GlideX on the laptop. A super handy software, this allowed me to project my smartphone on the laptop, use my phone as the laptop’s secondary display and also gave me the option to use one keyboard and mouse to control multiple devices. I could also transfer files with ease across both devices and even make hands-free phone calls from the laptop. All in all, an experience I’d highly recommend.

Performance

The ASUS Zenbook 14 is powered by the top-of-the-line Intel Core Ultra 9 285-H processor, with 32 GB RAM and 1 TB storage, of which about 854 GB was usable. Fairly powerful with its functioning, the Zenbook 14 is snappy with multiple applications open, while supporting both keyboard and touchscreen usage. I tried on a few online games as well, this time using the touchscreen and it was a lot of fun. The laptop doesn’t heat up while playing games, and the fan never gets audibly noisy.

There are ample connectivity options, including two Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports, one HDMI 2.1, 1 USB 3.2 port, and a 3.5 mm audio jack.

Battery

The unit packs in a 75 Wh battery which kept me company for almost 8-10 hours on full charge on most workdays. My typical usage consisted of lots of reading online, writing, responding to emails, playing games online, and watching videos for about an hour or less, with the brightness levels set to 60 per cent. The laptop ships with a 65 W type-C power adapter, making it easy to charge anywhere.

Verdict

There’s not much fault I could find with the ASUS Zenbook 14. The laptop is well-built, looks premium, has one of the best keyboards and touchpads in the market, sports an amazing OLED display and comes with a bunch of new functionalities such as an improved GlideX, Control Center and ScreenXpert 3.0 that pack in a lot of meaningful features, instead of being gimmicky. If you are in the market for a svelte but powerful laptop that does its job well so that you can too, look no further!