Asus U31JG review

Previous U-series models were made entirely of black plastic, but the U31JG adds a bit of variety with a grey wrist rest – otherwise, the brushed-metal-effect lid and glossy black screen bezel match previous models. Construction seems sound, with little flex in the lid, but sadly there’s quite a bounce in the keyboard panel. Thankfully, the keys’ action is light, with a crisp bite in the keystroke that provides enough feedback to compensate for this flex.

Below is a medium-sized touchpad that’s responsive and supports multi-touch gestures. It has a single see-saw button that has a very shallow action and a large central dead area, but it’s usable. Typical of an ultra-portable, the U31JG has no optical drive, but instead has a fairly standard collection of ports – three USB ports, VGA and HDMI video outputs, an Ethernet port and a memory card reader.

The U31JG’s Core i5-480M managed an overall score of 56 in our new benchmarks, putting it behind only the new Apple MacBook Pro in terms of raw performance. A score of 85 in the single-threaded image-editing test shows off the Core i5’s Turbo Boost, which can push the processor’s clock speed up to 2.9GHz, and with two physical cores, expanded to four cores through Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology, it’s no slouch when you’re running multiple programs or using multi-threaded applications such as video-encoding.

With decent performance as well as good battery life, a vibrant screen and a sensible selection of ports and other features, the U31JG ticks all the right boxes. It may not be the most stylish or exciting design, but at just over £600 it’s great value, especially when you consider the two year warranty, so it wins our Best Buy award.