Asus Zenbook Touch U500VZ review

The U500VZ may not be particularly suited to fine photo-editing, but it was a joy to use for everyday office tasks. Its full-size keyboard gave plenty of tactile feedback and its bouncy keys hardly made a sound while we were typing. You won’t want to press keys too hard, though, as we noticed quite a large amount of flex in the keyboard tray as we typed. This didn’t affect how we used the keyboard, but it’s not something we expect to see on such a high-end laptop.

The large all-in-one touchpad showed no such weaknesses, as its smooth surface responded very well to multitouch gestures. Pinch zooming was incredibly smooth and swiping from the side to perform Windows 8 shortcuts worked every time.

The U500VZ has a decent range of ports, too. As well as three USB3 ports, there’s an HDMI output for connecting the laptop to an external display, a mini VGA port, a multiformat card reader, a Gigabit Ethernet port and a combined headphone and microphone jack.

Happily, its integrated Bang & Olufsen speakers and bundled subwoofer produced a fantastic amount of bass in all of our test tracks. With the subwoofer attached, you won’t have any need for other speakers. Conveniently, the subwoofer’s compact design makes it very easy to pop in your bag.

You’ll be able to get a good half a day’s work out of the Touch U500VZ before you have to charge it. The U500VZ lasted 5 hours and 24 minutes in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness. This is a underwhelming compared to the extra two hours scored by the Zenbook Prime Touch, but this shouldn’t be much of a concern if you’re planning to use this laptop as a desktop replacement.

The Asus Zenbook Touch Z500VZ is a worthy Zenbook, but its screen is a little disappointing considering the price. It’s a powerful laptop with one of the most stylish designs we’ve seen in recent months, but there are better value desktop replacements out there, such as the award-winning MSI GE60. The MSI GE60 may not be as pretty, but it’s more powerful and a much better buy.