Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Asus Laptop Battery
We've had similar problems with non-unibody Apple MacBooks. Like the latter, the Zenbook's trackpad has been placed centrally to the chassis for aesthetic reasons, when in reality the main keys you use when typing are slightly to the left of the keyboard, so the trackpad should be as well. It's a little frustrating, but in practice won't mean you end up typing in the wrong place that often, although it does happen sometimes. The trackpad does support a useful selection of multi-touch functions, for which its large size is quite beneficial.
Another slight drawback is the lack of a built-in Gigabit Ethernet port, although a USB adapter is included, and otherwise the connectivity allocation is impressive for this chassis size. There's a single USB 3.0 and SD card reader on the left, whilst on the right can be found two more USB 3.0 ports, HDMI, an audio minijack and a mini VGA connection. Asus has helpfully supplied an adapter to turn this into a full-sized VGA port, which can still come in handy when connecting to a projector. Naturally, no optical drive is built in - this would have been next to impossible whilst maintaining the Zenbook's svelte chassis. But most of the time you won't miss it these days. There is the usual complement of wireless technologies available, including 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0, but also Intel WiDi for wireless display transmission.
Performance is decent for an Ultrabook. The Core i5 processor shows its grunt with a result of 2.4 in Maxon Cinebench R11.5's render test, which isn't up with desktop replacements such as Toshiba's Satellite L855-118, but quite a bit better than many ultraportables. The OpenGL score of 13.82 implies you wouldn't want to do any 3D graphics work on the move, even if this is streets ahead of Intel HD 3000 graphics, but 612 in 3DMark11 with Performance settings shows that a bit of gaming with low resolutions and quality settings will be possible, to idle away a journey. Asus promises more than 7 hours of battery such as Asus A32-1015 Battery , Asus Eee PC 1015 Battery , Asus Eee PC VX6 Battery , Asus Eee PC 1215 Battery , Asus AL31-1005 Battery , Asus Eee PC 1005 Battery , Asus Eee PC 1001HA Battery , Asus A32-F5 Battery , Asus X59 Battery , Asus AP32-1008P Battery , Asus AP31-1008P Battery , Asus Eee PC 1008P Battery life, and in our gruelling 100 per cent processor utilisation test it did last over two hours, so this sounds very plausible for lighter usage scenarios. In fact, if you're not using much processor or hard disk time, the UX32A seems to last a very long time indeed. Whilst you might only manage a movie or two on the plane, this laptop should give you a full journey's worth of everyday office activities. It also sits in standby for days on end without draining too much battery, coming back to life in a few seconds. This negates one of the advantages of Android-based alternatives, such as Asus's own Transformer range.
One of our favourite Ultrabooks has got even better with the UX32A. The latest Intel Ivy Bridge CPU generation packs even more processing power into the same power envelope, with a particularly significant improvement to graphics performance. The placement of the trackpad is an irritating Achilles' heel, but otherwise the Asus Prime UX32A remains one of the best alternatives to a MacBook Air, and at around £850 it's not outrageously priced, either.