Asus Zenbook A14. Arthur Fuentes, ABS-CBN News

MANILA – Asus’ Zenbook A14 thin-and-light laptop is an amazing piece of engineering that manages to balance portability and power, thanks to its Snapdragon X X1 chip. And it’s also a pretty stylish piece of tech.

The Zenbook A14 is thin and sleek, it weighs less than a kilo, and while it may not have the most powerful processor available, it still packs enough muscle to get you through the daily grind. And since this is an ARM chipset, endurance is not a problem: I could use it for a whole day’s work unplugged and still have enough juice left at the end of the grind.  

But first, the specs -- our review unit came in the ‘Zabriskie beige’ colorway with the following components:  

• 16 GB of RAM (LPDDR5X) 
• 512 GB SSD (M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0)  
• 14-inch 1920x1200 screen with a 16:10 aspect ratio and 60Hz refresh rate
• Snapdragon X X1 26 100

This chip is supposedly the budget Snapdragon that’s meant for laptops in the sub-$600 price range. But I didn’t really notice any performance lags compared to the higher-end Snapdragon X Plus laptops I reviewed before.  

It also has several ports: 

• 1x HDMI 2.1 
• 2x USB 4.0 Gen 3 Type-C with support for display/power delivery (data speed up to 40Gbps)
• 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A (data speed up to 10 Gbps)
• 1x 3.5mm combo audio jack

It would have been nice if they also included a microSD card slot for people who may want to edit pics and videos, just like in my older Zenbook, but still, that’s a lot of ports for a device that’s so thin.  

Asus says the laptop also passed the US MIL-STD 810H military-grade standard, which means it’s not a delicate piece of hardware that you need to fuss over when lugging it around– which is impressive when you consider how it weighs just 0.9 kilograms and is just 13.4mm at its thinnest side. This beats the Huawei Matebook X from last year in terms of lightness and thinness.

It doesn’t feel flimsy either–I didn’t detect any flex on the body when holding it on the side with one hand, or when laying my hands on the palm rest. Asus says they came up with a new material called Ceraluminum to make this possible--tacky name, but we'll take it. 

Asus Zenbook A14. Arthur Fuentes, ABS-CBN News

Asus Zenbook A14. Arthur Fuentes, ABS-CBN News

Asus Zenbook A14. Arthur Fuentes, ABS-CBN News

Typing on the keyboard also feels great. It’s not quite the best typing experience on a laptop, but it’s up there. The keys have a decent travel and feel clicky, not mushy.

Its 16:10 anti-glare screen also gets high marks–the aspect ratio is great for work, and the matte glass means bright lights around you aren’t a pain in the eyes when you’re working. I wish, though, that the screen could get a little brighter than 400 nits.

The trackpad is also good, although I still prefer the glass trackpad on older Zenbooks, which could switch into a numeric keypad for those times when you need to use Excel. Meanwhile, the full HD front camera supports Windows Hello, which means easier logins.

But the best feature of the A14 is definitely its power efficiency. A full charge can get you through the day. Thanks to its Snapdragon chip, this thing can handle a full nine-hour day’s work with more than 30 Chrome tabs open, including several YouTube tabs, Facebook tabs, online AI photo editing apps, Gmail, Docs, Teams, and media websites.

Zenbooks are supposed to be Asus’ premium consumer laptops, making me wonder why this model seems priced lower than some of its supposedly mid-tier Vivobooks. It is listed as P61,995 by an online retailer, which is actually pretty affordable given the specs.

I had been raring to get my hands on a Snapdragon-powered Zenbook since these machines were announced last year. Reviewers had been gushing over how sleek, light and power-efficient they were. Thankfully, when I finally got a review unit, the Zenbook pretty much lived up to the hype. If you need an easy-to-carry, powerful laptop with a bit of elegance thrown in, the Zenbook A14 is for you.