[Review] ASUS U38DT Sleekbook

The world of ultra-thin laptops have been made famous by customers’ demands of lightweight, thin and moderately powered laptops. The ultra-thin category already redefined what netbooks already replaced most netbooks in the world. Posing a challenge in its power consumption and long-lasting battery life, ultra-thin are not the easy mobile devices to choose from.

First and foremost, ultra-thin laptops have been divided into two categories – AMD-based ones are Sleekbooks whereas Intel-based ones are Ultrabooks. There are quite a few significant differences between them but that’ll be another story for now.

ASUS came out with the U38DT – an AMD-based Sleekbook, and we got ourselves a unit to mess around and to play with. Of course, this is a review and let’s take a look at it.

[nextpage title=”In the package”]

Like any other laptops, it has a pretty simple packaging. Opening up you can see the laptop itself, and two compartments on the right side with the power brick and also a pouch which we’ll get into later.

The power brick is a small 65W supply which has a certain awfully familiar design. Has a detachable It is however small and portable enough to be fitted into a pocket of a cargo pants and light enough to be carrying and walking around with it in the pocket. The cable of the power brick is also long enough and you wouldn’t have to worry about the brick making the wire sagging – the adapter itself is the brick.

The small pouch that’s beside the power brick and ASUS is generous enough to include a micro HDMI to VGA connector and also an Ethernet to USB connector. The quality of the small pouch is made out of part leather for the flap and other is made out of very rough fabric, ensures protection with a layer of cushion inside and sealed with Velcro.

Beneath the laptop, there’s also another pouch for the laptop itself that has a similar design and material like the accessories pouch – leather flap, rough fabric for the body and cushioned internally, sealed with a Velcro – and it fits the U38DT very well, tight and snugs in.

Going further down beneath the laptop pouch, there’s a small box with the laptop’s model hot stamped onto it. Inside the box, it contains the usual things – a user guide, a manual and also a cable tie. The extra cable tie is certainly something nice to have.

[nextpage title=”I/O Ports”]Taking a look at the Sleekbook itself, ASUS definitely didn’t go stingy on providing some extra ports on either side of the laptop.

On the left side, there is a single USB 3.0 port and also a card reader, whereas the right side has a DC jack, two USB 3.0 ports, a full sized HDMI port, a micro HDMI port and also a 3.5mm combo jack. ASUS gave a sufficient amount of USB ports – all of them 3.0 – and also weirdly included two HDMI ports, one micro and another full sized, which I don’t see the need of two ports that does the same thing.

At the bottom of the laptop, we can see that there are two speaker holes subtly hidden at the sides and also a ventilation exhaust way at the hinge.

At the top right side of the keyboard, beside the power button, there’s a subtle hard disk activity light that is embedded into the aluminium body itself and there’s another similar activity light at the right side of the laptop too.

[nextpage title=”Design and build quality”]

The U38DT is a 13.3-incher with an aluminium body, providing its super lightweight and super durability – a great replacement to plastic and also gives out the premium feel and touch to it. From opening the laptop’s lid itself, we know that the hinge is of high quality – it can be opened with just one finger, and the laptop does not slide or tip over. It just sits right there, steadily.

As the category of such laptops are called ultra-thin laptops, it is of course amazingly thin and light to the point that it can be easily lifted with one hand for an extended period of time. No doubt that I can carry it around everywhere for an entire day too!

[nextpage title=”Screen”]

In any devices, of course the screen is the most important. The U38DT features an amazing non-touchable matte screen that has 1366×768 pixels with enhanced wide viewing angles under the most vividly coloured screen. It is clear and bright, and again thanks to the matte screen, it is perfectly usable under direct harsh sunlight at any time of the day. There is also an auto-brightness feature which works very well, and we’ll talk about that in a while.

[nextpage title=”Keyboard”]

The keyboard is by all means the most important medium of communication between the user and the device. ASUS here opted for a Chiclet keyboard with edge-lit illumination. The keys are with decent tactile feedback – a decent spring but not much space to be pressed down.

The keyboard keys itself are trimmed and reduced to accommodate all the keys and the power button of such a large size in such a small area. Even with such large keys, the spacing between them is adequate and really comfortable to type in. The keyboard lacks no keys but have a bunch of Fn keys as alternatives.

Laptop keyboards of course has a bunch of function keys (Fn keys) to put even more features within the already-less-keys keyboard. The usual controls for WiFi, brightness and touchpad is present, but what baffles me is the absence of multimedia controls – the Play/Pause, Next and Previous buttons. One thing that is surprising though is the presence of the auto-brightness toggle. It works surprisingly well where you can toggle the auto-brightness and it significantly changes the brightness. Even on auto-brightness, the individual brightness of the screen and the keyboard can still be finely tuned to better suit your preference.

[nextpage title=”Touchpad”]The complementary of keyboard. The touchpad of this laptop is large, smooth and can glide across the surface with much speed and precision. Since it is a one-piece touchpad, there are no buttons – only a rocker at the lower side of it for left and right clicking, which the tacticle feedback could have been better. It is definitely responsive and sensitive to multitouch and the driver provides some basic Windows 8 gestures like swipe-from-right for Charms bar and swipe-from-left for the Start menu.

Though one major issue here with the touchpad is the driver itself. Once the laptop is waking up from sleep mode, it will first take a long time to reinitialize the driver, which you can see a CMD windows appearing for a split second, and then wait for another few seconds for the multitouch to work again. In another case, if you have a lot of apps open, the driver will be cached to the hard disk and again it will take some time for the driver to respond to your multitouch gesture.

[nextpage title=”Performance”]I personally believe that an ultrathin laptop is not appropriate to have its performance benchmarked by a bunch of simulations and rated by numbers. So, let’s take it out for some real life testing of an intensive user. First, here’s the list of specs of the U38DT.

• AMD Trinity A8-4555M running on 1.6GHz~2.4GHz
• AMD Radeon HD 8550M graphics with 1GB DDR3 VRAM
• AMD A70M chipset
• 2GB of DDR 1600MHz RAM onboard, can have a total of 6GB
• 13.3-inch matte screen with enhanced wide view
• 500GB SATA3 hard disk with 5400rpm
• 48Wh battery

The first thing I can tell you that the U38DT has only 1.45GB of usable RAM. It surely does lag a lot, and I’m not surprised that the entire laptop can hang while listening songs and browsing on Chrome only. Obviously multitasking is a bit of a stressful work for the 1.45GB of RAM, so we tried something different.

As Firefox is still using less resources than Chrome does, we switched over to Firefox and turned off the music to see if it’s any better and just as I predicted – the laptop still lags.

Then we tried to proceed with a different test – to batch render and save RAW format pictures as JPG on Photoshop. This test is purely for the processor and graphics, which the U38DT fares out pretty well. Photos are processed and saved very quickly – within 8 seconds. Certainly the AMD combo here doesn’t disappoint at all.

Coming back to the issue of RAM, I’d like to point out that the insufficiency of RAM causes it to cache everything to the hard disk – including the touchpad driver. It does take a very long time to load it back, and even longer when it’s in sleep mode.

So let’s do some benchmarking – if that’ll satisfy your craving for numbers – with the most basic, most generic benchmarking mechanism that Windows has included since Windows Vista.

Speaking of sleep mode, the U38DT takes a ridiculously long time to get to sleep. ASUS included something called InstantOn – which we’ll explain later – does not really do anything to help at all.

[nextpage title=”Audio and video performance”]Surely, everyone watches movies and listens to songs on their devices. Who doesn’t? Being a lagger of only 1.45GB of usable RAM, we put it to run some large file sized videos. It of course takes a lot of seconds to load the video up initially.

The U38DT can run 1080p videos which are 10-bit encoded, though the frames skips and stutters when sought across the video clip. Running a 10.9GB video that is 1080p, 8-bit encoded videos however runs very smoothly and no frame skipping when sought.

As for the audio performance, the U38DT like any other ASUS laptops, has Bang & Olufsen ICEpower audio. We of course tested the loudspeakers and it sounded very loud, clear and crisp. Being the most obvious of Captain Obvious here, it has no bass at all. Audio played through the audio jack however is decent.

[nextpage title=”Battery and charger”]

The battery – 48Wh. It can give more than 5 hours of use even on the intensive WiFi usage, Microsoft Office and music together, and it’s on automatic brightness. The battery charges exceptionally fast too.

The charger itself is an awfully familiarly shaped one and as mentioned before, it is light and compact. It has an LED at the DC jack to indicate the battery status – orange for charging, green for full. A bummer though is that the charger has no ground wire, meaning that currents do leak across the laptop.

[nextpage title=”Upgradability and maintenance”]

A reminder – this is an ultrathin laptop. They’re not meant for any type of upgrades, but what the heck – I took apart the back plate to see if there’s anything that can be done, and surely there is! Of course, we’ll have to unscrew it and the U38DT uses the unconventional torx screw – the hexagonal, flower-shaped screw – and it’ll be a hassle for many people.

We already found that the laptop has 2GB of RAM already inside, but we’re only seeing one RAM slot – meaning that the 2GB is really built in, as in soldered to the board rather than have the modularity of a RAM slot. The single RAM slot lets you expand up to 4GB of additional RAM, giving up to a total maximum RAM of 6GB.

To remove the hard disk is as easy as in any other laptops. Directly take off the screws securing it and pop it out. You can also upgrade to any other hard disks you like – be it an SSD, a hybrid drive or the conventional spinning one.

Another thing that I find fancy is the capability to replace the WiFi card directly. To replace it of course you’ll first have to find a WiFi card that has the same size as the one in the U38DT. I’m not responsible if it doesn’t work because I do not know if the BIOS has a hardware whitelist feature or not.

The fans are also fully exposed with the back plate removed, granting easy maintenance and accessibility. Just be careful of all the sensitive electronic components that are exposed.

[nextpage title=”ASUS Specialty software”]ASUS included a bunch of software in the U38DT, and we have a list and summarized it all for you.

• ASUS Tutor
  • An quick start guidance app on Windows 8 and ASUS features
• World Clock
  • Does what it does, but cycling around clocks around the world is not pleasant
• ASUS Installation Wizard
  • Loads up a list of updates and drivers to be downloaded and installed
• Asus Live Update
  • Does pretty much what Installation Wizard does; has BIOS update capability
• ASUS InstantOn
  • Makes the device wake up from sleep a lot faster and can sleep a lot longer
• ASUS Instant Connect Installer
  • Sets up your Android phone for internet tethering through USB
• ASUS Vibe Fun Center
  • Something like a media hub
• WebStorage Sync Agent
  • Manages folders and files to be sync to WebStorage, ASUS’ cloud storage
• ASUS Splendid
  • Tunes the screen’s settings
  • Has 4 preset profiles
• ASUS LifeFrame 3
  • Lets you take selfies and videos of yourself
  • Has a lot of settings

[nextpage title=”Wrap up”]So we’ve look into all of the aspects of the ASUS U38DT, what’s the conclusion? It surely is a decent AMD Sleekbook, that’s for sure. At a price of RM2,199 though, it gave us a list of things to recap and reconsider first :

• Pros :
  • Very light and thin
  • Long battery life
  • Has edge-lit keyboard
  • Smooth and sensitive touchpad
  • Beautiful matte screen
  • Hinge can open to about 140 degrees maximum
  • Good keyboard
  • Small and portable power brick
  • Loud stereo speakers
  • Easy maintenance and upgradability
• Cons :
  • Insufficient RAM
  • No SSD or hybrid hard disk
  • No mSATA slot
  • Takes a long time to wake from sleep
  • Uses torx screw
  • Touchpad driver takes a long time to reinitialize after waking up from sleep

Rating : 7/10

With great battery life, keyboard and touchpad, if it is insufficient in RAM, there isn’t any joy to use it. Initialization of the touchpad while waking from sleep is not fun at all. In the bottom line, a minimum of 4GB RAM is needed. Without the presence of an SSD or a hybrid hard disk, I wonder why this is called an ultrabook in the first place.

Surely you can opt for some free RAM from retailers while making your purchase, as most retailers do offer free RAM upgrades. The RRP of this Sleekbook is RM2,199, a little hefty but I’d say it’s quite a good price – just that the lack of SSD or a hybrid hard disk makes me a feel a little doubtful.

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