
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Update 3/4: Still loving this laptop, very fast and the battery life is amazing. Just found out that this laptop is the PC Magazines Editors Choice for Mainstream laptops, beating out the HP Envy and Macbook Pro! That should attest to how great this laptop is.
Update 2/23: After doing some research I found out that this indeed does have Turbo Boost, but it's not as easily accessed by the end user, it's now in the BIOS instead of a software option. It is auto enabled when you switch to High Performance or Entertainment mode which boosts your CPU to 2.9GHz vs 2.53GHz (Verified with CPU-Z)
I also had a little trouble with some of my older games running in FAST FORWARD, as in cut scenes were going super fast, units moved way to quickly, etc... All you need to do is update your Nvidia drivers and those issues are sorted out.
The new Webcam (compared to the older UL series) now works with Skype and looks much, much better.
Original Review:
I have been using the laptop for about 4 days, Amazon unfortunately did not have the best price so I purchased from a different retailer but felt that I would provide my experience here.
I had been using a UL Series laptop for around a year and a half and when I discovered the U Series coming out soon I felt that it was time to upgrade, to say the least I am very happy that I did.
Build quality:
It's great for the price range this laptop is in. Minimal plastic/glossy surfaces, and the Aluminum shell is very nice and doesn't gather fingerprints nearly as much as glossy surfaces do. Palm rests are solid and look great (brushes aluminum look) and the Left and Right click buttons feel solid.
Improvement over the UL Series:
The biggest gripes I had with the UL Series laptops were the very bad viewing angles for the screen, the horrible dimpled track pad/clicking buttons, and the 80% glossy surface that picked up fingerprints extremely quickly. This new U series addresses all of those problems. The screen is much, MUCH better than my old UL laptop (UL50VT), and the viewing angles are fantastic. The new smooth track pad is much easier to use, and the clicking buttons are much easier to press and are a little bit quieter. Most of the glossy surfaces have been replace with "brushed aluminum" looking plastic that don't show fingerprints at all. Another issue I had was the graphics switching seemed clunky on the UL Series and this new U series switches graphics much smoother/faster. The webcam also works a lot better. The laptop is a bit lighter.
The keyboard has no flex when typing normally, but if you press down on it hard you can see a flex happen. I don't see a situation when you would need to press on the keys that hard but I guess this is an issue for some so I wanted to point that out.
Performance:
The dual core i3 is very fast and runs programs great, standard 4GB of ram is perfect for this laptop, and the built in graphics handle normal tasks and HD video fine. The discreet GeForce GT 425M handles games fantastically. As pointed out before, it runs Dead Space 2 (which is fairly graphics intensive) very, very well even on Ultra settings. The normal hard drive works fine, about 35 seconds to boot and once Windows is fully loaded (about 20 seconds) programs open very fast. I installed a SSD on day 2 and now the laptop boots in ~10 seconds, and Windows is fully loaded instantly. The laptop is extremely fast with either an HDD or SSD. The speakers sound great for a laptop.
Battery Life:
Using Power Saving mode with the screen adjusted to 90%, I get around 7.5-8 hours of battery life with the normal HDD. 8-9 with an SSD. In high performance with advanced graphics turned on and screen adjusted to 100%, I get around 4.5 hours of battery life. 5 hours with an SSD.
Some notable cons:
Battery life isn't as good as my UL laptop which gets around 9 hours in battery saving mode with 90% screen brightness. (normal HDD)
---> My UL Laptop came with "Turbo Boost" which overclocked the processor by 30%. This laptop doesn't include that feature. The i3 works fine though at the stock clock rating.
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