Asus Zenbook Edition 30 Review

Asus Zenbook Edition 30 Review

In the past, I have used and reviewed several Asus laptops. All those were interesting with ScreenPad and secondary display like features. But the current Asus laptop I am using right now is the most beautiful and premium looking laptop I have used ever. I am talking about Asus Zenbook Edition 30. This laptop is beautiful without any compromise in performance and features. Asus ZenBook Edition 30 laptop has been launched to celebrate 30 years of Asus. And it genuinely looks like a special edition. It is a limited edition laptop and not yet available in the Indian market. I got this from the Asus to try and based on my experience, here is the review of Asus Zenbook Edition 30.

Asus ZenBook Edition 30 is all about its premium look. The lid of the laptop has luxurious Pearl White genuine leather along with Rose Gold anodized diamond-cut edges. It also has an exclusive gold-plated 30th-anniversary logo on the lid. So, this laptop genuinely looks really premium and unique. Asus claims that the leather lid cover is hand-stitched and hand-finished by experienced craftsmen.

This is also one of the smallest 13-inch laptops and is smaller than the A4 sheet of paper. It is light in weight with 1.29 grams of weight and is easy to hold. So, this premium laptop is ultra-portable.

On the left side, it has DC-In port for charging, an HDMI port, A full-size USB and a USB Type-C port. On the right side, the laptop has a microSD card slot, a full-size USB port, a 3.5mm aux port and tiny notification lights for battery and HDD.

The laptop also comes with a special wireless Pearl White mouse, mouse pad and a genuine-leather sleeve with the 30th-anniversary logo on both. The laptop also comes in a leather-look box.

Tech Specs

  • 13.3-inch LED-backlit Full HD (1920 x 1080) 16:9 slim-bezel NanoEdge display
  • 5.65-inch FHD+ (2160 x 1080) Super IPS display
  • 1.8GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-8565U processor with Turbo Boost (up to 4.6GHz) and 8MB cache
  • NVIDIA GeForce MX250 2GB GDDR5 VRAM / Integrated Intel UHD Graphics 620
  • 16GB 2133MHz LPDDR3 RAM
  • 1TB PCIe Gen3x4 SSD
  • Full-size backlit keyboard, with 1.4mm key travel
  • Windows 10 Pro/Home
  • ASUS SonicMaster stereo audio system
  • HD IR camera
  • WiFi 5
  • Bluetooth 5.0
  • 50Wh 3-cell lithium-polymer battery
  • 65W power adapter

Asus Zenbook Edition 30 comes with a 13.3-inch LED-backlit Full HD NanoEdge display. The laptop has slot bezels with a four-sided frameless NanoEdge design. Asus claims a 95% screen to body ratio. This is a Full HD display but it really impresses with clarity and picture quality. 4K videos look really good due to vivid and bright colors. The display has wide-viewing angles and it works really good even in out-doors. So, working on the go isn’t a problem.

Asus Zenbook Edition 30 Review

This laptop is also powerful. It comes with Intel Core i7-8565 CPU clocked at 1.8GHz but with Turbo Boost up to 4.6GHz. It has integrated UHD Graphics 620 along with NVIDIA GeForce MX250 with a 2GB video RAM. It comes with 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 1TB SSD storage. The laptop boots fast and performance is really impressive. It handles everything fine. There’s no lag anywhere and the laptop also doesn’t heat even after using it for long. It is powerful, so you can also use it for gaming or video editing.

I also did some benchmark tests. Here are a few. It scored well confirming its high performance.

Here is the read/write speed test of internal storage using CrystalDiskMark. Read/write speed is really impressive and that’s the reason for the snappy fast performance.

The laptop has ScreenPad that acts as a TrackPad and a secondary screen both. It is of 5.65-inches (2160x1080p IPS) diagonal and supports four-finger smart gestures. Basically, it looks like a smartphone attached to the laptop. ScreenPad runs on version 2.0 that claims to come with an improved experience. It offers input and control for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It also has third-party apps including Spotify. There’s also an app for handwriting recognition.

The Screenpad has its own settings option to control brightness, resolution and refresh rate.

This ScreenPad can also be used as NumPad if you want. Overall, the ScreenPad is to increase productivity. You can drag any software to the secondary display. For example, I could play YouTube on Chrome to secondary display while working on my documents on the main display. There could be several use cases depending on your choice.

The laptop comes with a backlit keyboard with 1.4mm key travel. I really liked the typing experience on this laptop. The only issue I faced is with the right shift key. The right Shift key is usually the large key just below the Enter key. But in this keyboard, it is a tiny key, so I mostly end up press up arrow in place of shift. It will take a few months before I could get used to it.

Zenbook Edition 30 Review

Functions keys work when they are pressed along with the Fn key. Otherwise, each button has been assigned to some tasks. Along with volume control and brightness control, there are buttons to turn on/off ScreenPad, turn on/off keyboard backlit light, lock Windows, turn off Camera, Capture screenshot and launch Asus software.

The laptop has an IR camera that supports Windows Hello biometric facial recognition. The face unlock is really fast and works fine even in low light. I am not impressed with the quality of this camera. It can only capture 1 MP photos and can record up to 720p video at 30 fps. The quality of both photos and videos is not good. So, the video calling experience wasn’t good. There’s a dedicated button to turn off the camera when you do not want to use it. This has been added for privacy reasons.

The laptop comes with Harman Kardon speakers that really impress. The sound is loud and you don’t need to pair the laptop with any other speaker. The sound quality is also really good considering it to be a laptop speaker. The sound quality over the headphone jack is also impressive.

Asus Zenbook Edition 30 Review

ZenBook Edition 30 features dual-band gigabit-class Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5 connectivity. Both options work well. It has microSD card slot, but I prefer having an SD card slot in the laptop for transferring camera photos to the laptop quickly. This could be a disappointment for photographers. It has both Type-C and Type-A USB port and a standard HDMI port.

The laptop has excellent battery life. It easily lasts for more than 10 hours in regular usage with SreenPad off. My usage mostly involved in web surfing, emails, coding and YouTube. With ScreenPad on, the battery life drops to give 6 hours of backup. So it is recommended to turn off the ScreenPad when you do not want to use that. The laptop also supports fast charging and this laptop can be fully charged from 0-100% in 1 hour and 10 minutes.

Final Words

ASUS ZenBook Edition 30 is a premium and powerful ultrabook. It comes with a unique design, excellent display, powerful performance, and long battery life. ScreenPad 2.0 makes it a productivity machine. Even if the apps are limited, but it will be better with the time. ZenBook Edition 30 was launched as a special edition laptop to celebrate 30 years of its existence and the laptop is truly a masterpiece. I really loved the special feel of the laptop.

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