Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Acer Laptop Battery
Andrew CunninghamThe trackpad is one large, smooth square of plastic with a small line at the bottom where a standard trackpad's buttons would be to show users where they can right and left click. Clicking (or tapping) with one finger anywhere else on the surface of the trackpad will left click, and clicking (or tapping) with two fingers will right-click; other gestures like pinch-to-zoom and inertial two-finger scrolling are also enabled and work without any major hitches. While two-finger scrolling, I found that some very small movements that would initiate scrolling on an Apple trackpad would instead right-click on the Zenbook's trackpad—if you're used to an Apple trackpad, you'll just need to learn to make larger movements for scrolling.
Andrew CunninghamThe keyboard on the Zenbook with battery like Acer AS07A31 Battery , Acer AS07A51 Battery , Acer Aspire 4520 Battery , Acer AS07B72 Battery , Acer Aspire 5520 Battery , Acer BTP-43D1 Battery , Acer TravelMate 220 Battery , Acer BTP-58A1 Battery , acer BTP-60A1 Battery , Acer TravelMate 240 Battery , Acer AS10B31 Battery , Acer Aspire 4820 Battery is also excellent, with springy island-style keys that feel great to use—they're made of a lightly textured plastic with attractive italicized letters and a nice, even backlight that responds to ambient light and has four different brightness levels (off, low, medium, and high). All of the keys are full-sized except for the top row, which shrinks the half-height function keys horizontally to make room for the power button, pause, print screen, and delete keys. The arrow keys are also half-height and of slightly reduced width, and double as page up/down, home, and end keys when used in conjunction with the Function key. As long as you don't dislike chiclet keyboards on principle, the Zenbook's keyboard is as good as anything I've used—the travel is superior to Apple's keyboards, and I prefer the shape of the keys to the slightly scooped ones that Lenovo is using these days.
There's not much to say about what's on the inside of the UX31A, since it's broadly similar to just about every Ivy Bridge Ultrabook out there: a dual-core processor (a 1.9GHz Core i7-3517U in our review unit, a 1.7GHz Core i5-3317U in the base unit) and Intel's HD 4000 integrated graphics processor drive most of the action—they're very zippy for most productivity tasks, and while the HD 4000 won't be able to play modern games very well at the panel's 1920x1080 resolution, Ivy Bridge's graphics are good enough that you should be able to play most things at lower settings or resolutions.
A 256GB SATA 3.0 solid-state drive from ADATA (a 128GB drive is available in the entry-level version) keeps boot times low and minimizes the time it takes to load applications—it takes about 17 seconds to cold boot Windows 7, and just five or six seconds to boot Windows 8. Dual-band wireless and Bluetooth come courtesy of Intel's Centrino 6235 adapter. Asus doesn't give an absolute battery life number, only saying that the ZenBook Prime gets "25 percent more battery life than other Ultrabooks," but in light-to-moderate usage (Web browsing and word processing, mostly) with the screen at half brightness and the wireless on we got a little over six hours out of the UX31A's battery, roughly comparable to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon and fairly typical for 13-inch Ultrabooks.