ASUS ZenBook Flip UX360CA Review

ASUS is known to bring out some good quality laptops over the years. And now, they have released their newest addition to their line of transformable laptops, the ASUS ZenBook Flip UX360CA. With an ultra thin and lightweight form factor combined with an Intel Core M3 processor, its designed to handle everyday computing wherever you may be. We got our hands on one, so let’s find out just how capable this machine is.

Design and Build Quality

Thin, lightweight, and beautiful. Those are the three main words that would describe the ZenBook Flip. It feels well-built and the aluminium body makes it feel very solid and sturdy even when its just 13.9mm thin. It only weighs 1.3Kg, so there also shouldn’t be any problems carrying it around.

Left
– SD Card Reader
– USB 3.0 Port
– Power Indicator
– Power Button
– Volume Rocker

Right
– USB 3.0 Port
– AC adapter plug
– USB-C Gen 1 Port
– Micro HDMI Port
– Microphone/Headset Jack

Typing on this thing is a joy thanks to the responsive keyboard. The keys feel very solid with no hints of getting stuck or wobbling.

Shifting to tablet mode is as easy as it gets. All you need to do is flip the cover over and voila! you’re now in tablet mode. ASUS claims that the mechanism involved has been tested with over 20,000 close/open cycles to ensure reliability, and actually, i think they did a good job here. The keyboard and touchpad automatically gets disabled in tablet mode so you don’t have to worry about accidentally typing anything.

Being a transformable device, the ZenBook Flip’s touchscreen feels very responsive with minimal quirks. Accuracy is on point and it responds to minimal pressure, which is useful especially when typing with the on-screen keyboard or tapping on links/buttons.

Display

The 13.3-inch IPS display on the ZenBook Flip looks amazing especially for media consumption. Brightness is good, text is sharp and colors pop out with good a good amount of contrast and saturation.

Specifications and Performance

Dimensions: 323 x 220 x 13.9 mm
Weight: 1.3kg with battery
Processor: Intel® Core™ M3 6Y30 Processor @0.90GHz
Display: 13.3″ (16:9) LED backlit FHD (1920×1080) Glare Touchscreen
RAM: 4 GB LPDDR3 (1866MHz)
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 515
Camera: HD 720p

Benchmarks

PCMark 7: 4205
CINEBENCH R15: CPU: 212  Graphics: 29.85 fps
Novabench: 609

The ZenBook Flip is powered by a Skylake Intel® Core™ M3 6Y30 Processor @0.90GHz which is basically a dual core processor with 4 threads coupled with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, Intel HD Graphics 515 and a 512GB SATA3 M.2 SSD.

In terms of performance, the ZenBook Flip handled everyday tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet editing, playing video and music and web browsing with no issues. Boot up was also lightning fast thanks to the SSD. As for gaming, well you can Dota 2 on it, but you’ll have to turn your settings to the lowest if you really want to achieve smooth gameplay. That alone gives you an idea on how it would perform on even more graphic intensive games. So If you’re looking to play AAA titles, you may want to look somewhere else as there are gaming laptops which are built for that purpose.

Software

The ZenBook Flip runs on Windows 10. And while the experience is generally smooth, I did encounter some hiccups on my first boot. Some apps won’t open and a weird error when trying to install Chrome. Thankfully, all it took was a reboot and the problems were gone. Another thing to take note of is that it comes with a lot of pre-loaded software such as McAfee LiveSafe, WPS Office, Evernote, and the ASUS suite of apps. As usual, the pre-installed antivirus software seemed to slow the machine a little, and the amount of notifications can get a little annoying. In any case, you can uninstall most of them from the Control Panel.

Audio

The Audio Quality from both the headset jack and the dedicated speakers is very good. You get a detailed and crisp sound with just the right amount of bass. The volume is a bit lacking for me but well, we all have different ears right?

Battery Life

ASUS claims that the battery should last 12 hours between charges. The hours indicated in the battery icon kept on changing, (showed 10 hours remaining at 89% and when i hovered again it showed 7 hours) but with actual combination of light to moderate usage (browsing, word processing etc.) with a little gaming on the side, I was able to squeeze out a good 7 to 8 hours, which i think is close enough.

Verdict

The ZenBook Flip UX360CA looks good, has an excellent display, handles everyday tasks well, and has good battery life. Its not without shortcomings however: The amount of bloatware and notifications can be annoying, and the seemingly underpowered processing package isn’t very appealing either. But for what it was built for, i’d say its a decent choice.

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Emman Tortoza

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Emman has been writing technical and feature articles since 2010. Prior to this, he became one of the instructors at Asia Pacific College in 2008, and eventually landed a job as Business Analyst and Technical Writer at Integrated Open Source Solutions for almost 3 years.