Check out my review of the Asus Zenbook Flip S UX371 2-in-1 laptop, recently launched in India. It ticks all the boxes for me as a premium ultrabook but has got me worried about battery backup.
I purchased the Asus Zenbook Flip S UX371EA laptop as a replacement for my three-year-old Microsoft Surface Book. I have been using this laptop for two weeks now, and here are my initial observations.
Pros
· Premium looks and build quality – Design and build quality is stunning, and it’s one of the most portable windows devices I have used, even lighter than the Microsoft Surface Book. The rose gold touch to edges adds that slick look to the overall ‘Jade Black.’ colour profile of the laptop. The ergo lift hinge mechanism feels sturdy, and thankfully the screen does not wobble.
· Display - I got this laptop purely for the 4K OLED display, as I would be using it more for photography editing and occasional full HD and 4K video editing. After getting used to the pixel sense display on MS surface book, it was difficult for me to go back to using a full HD laptop for image editing; there are minimal options for laptops with 4K screens - HP Spectre x360 - 13-aw0188tu matches the specs but costs up to INR 1.84 Lakhs, the next best option is Dell XPS 2-in-1 9000 series which also costs above INR 1.90 Lakhs
Screen brightness is suitable for indoor and outdoor work; you may need to tweak the visual profile from display settings and the MyAsus app to lower the saturation levels as I found red tones too vivid to my taste and the blacks too deep while watching 4K content. The overall color grading is sharp and vibrant.
· The keyboard layout is comfortable, and the keys feel plush to type on. I haven’t felt any finger fatigue, and keyboard clacking noise is considerably less. The trackpad is wide to house a digital numeric keypad activated with one touch and offers two brightness levels. I am not going to use this feature much, and hence I find the wide keypad a bit of an irritant to my regular typing speed despite having a useful palm rejection feature.
· I wanted to buy a laptop with an AMD Ryzen processor. Still, with the other specs combined, there are no other laptops from any manufacturer with a 4K screen, 16GB RAM, and 1TB SSD available in India. So I had decided to go with the latest Intel processor variant – 11th Gen i7 and WiFi 6 enabled. I did notice that the internet browsing speeds are much better. When I stream games from my Xbox series X, I do not see much lag on a 5Ghz connection.
I use Luminar 4 and Luminar AI to edit images, and DaVinci Resolve to edit videos; these applications run without any noticeable performance issues, exporting an edited 4K video does take more time than my iPad mini, I am yet to test 360 image and video editing on the Insta360 STUDIO 2021 software.
Cricket 19 game downloaded from Steam runs smoothly between 30-50 FPS with most in-game settings cranked to high levels. It does not support crowd rendering in any mode. I have to play with the crowd option turned off, don’t push your luck much with gaming on this laptop as the onboard Intel Iris XE GPU has its limitations, more with this laptop, to be precise.
· Sound quality from the down-firing speakers on the Zenbook Flip S is decent for a 13-inch laptop; Sound output has an acceptable bass level without the need to use any sound enhancing software. The laptop comes equipped with a Realtek sound console app which can be used to configure equalizer for sound settings
You get a high-quality leather sleeve for the laptop with good cushioning inside; A stylus has been provided, which is useful for my general image retouching while editing. I am not going to use it for extensive artwork in tablet mode. An additional USB-A port would have been useful for me on this laptop. I will not miss the 3.5mm headphone jack; two Thunderbolt USB-C ports help with high-speed data transfers and can be used to slow charge the laptop with any power bank.
Cons
· Battery life – I am observing the battery backup on this laptop as I write this review, and I have my doubts about the power management. I am not getting beyond 5-6 hours with display set to 4K, and I know Windows 10 battery health meter is not a reliable measure to track battery performance. Still, it drops at a steady rate even when I am not doing processor-intensive tasks. I need to run additional tests with the display setting on FHD when I don’t need the 4K display option.
· Temperature Control – I have installed an app - Speccy, which provides real-time CPU temperatures; while writing this review on MS Word and Spotify running in the background with a laptop placed on a raised stand, temperature readings were in the range of 50 – 60 degrees Celcius. You can control the fan speeds from the MyAsus App. The fans run loud sometimes while running system-heavy background tasks with the laptop getting uncomfortably hot near the raised hinge area on the back. I removed the McAfee anti-virus real-time scan software to check battery usage impact and fans running on full blow when this software performed a full system scan in the background.
· Windows 10 – Windows as a platform for desktop/laptop is devolving rather than improving; this could be my last Windows laptop as I would go for an Apple Mac in the future. The Pinterest app downloaded from the Windows store does not work. The Flipboard app has text scaling and UI issues. Zenbook Flip S laptop came with a DTS Sound processing app which only worked once, and it has not been updated since 2018 on the Windows app store. I was using the Font Candy paid app on my previous laptop, it has been pulled down as the developer shut shop; it seems, at least I need to have access to the app I paid for!
If you are looking for a premium 2 in 1 windows laptop, Asus does not disappoint with the Zenbook Flip S UX371 as it comes with all the bells and whistles loaded. I had read articles and watched online reviews for Asus Zenbook Flip S UX371; It does not perform so well with competition on benchmark scores having the same specs - Intel Core i7-1165G7 and Intel Iris XE graphics. I am not the one who pays much attention to these numbers and real-life performance matters to me...
I did stretch my budget a bit to buy this laptop. Else I would have gone for a laptop with a dedicated GPU and AMD Ryzen processor, FHD screen. 4K screen was a deal-breaker for me; hence I have chosen to stick with this laptop for another three years or so unless the battery springs up an unwanted surprise which I am monitoring
If you have any questions about this laptop, you can leave your comments to this review; I'll try my best to answer your queries