Monster Technology

I got this on Nov. 16th. At the first time, I really loved it.

It doesn’t look cheap at all, keyboard layout is good.

I planned to get an extra 2G RAM, but I don’t need it anymore because it is so fast.

That night, this little thing had a problem.

I couldn’t change is power plan.

So, I asked to Amazon.com for a replacement. I got it in two days.(Amazon rocks!)

I dropped by UPS center to return one laptop, and went to library.

There was another problem.

When I pointed the battery icon on the right bottom side, it showed a message(plugged in, not charging)

WTF?

It supposed to show me (fully charged) or (plugged in, charging).

I mailed to Amazon.com customer center, and also Asus.

All of them happened only in five days.

I don’t have time to argue on this thing since I’m taking five classes in a college.

Think once more before you order.
Rating: 2 / 5

Got this laptop yesterday. When I’m close to the router, I connect over wifi fine. When I move to 20ft away, connection is very limited to non-existent. An old sony laptop sitting right next to it connects just fine, and it only has a BG card. Not sure what’s wrong. I can only seem the Intel BGN 1000 wireless card sucks – in either case, that’s a deal breaker for an ultraPORTABLE laptop. I plan to call ASUS, if I can’t get anywhere with them, I will return the laptop – to me lack of connectivity is a deal breaker.

I’ll post any updates.

Other than that, it’s a nice looking light laptop with 6 hours of battery life on 50% screen brightness/wifi on. I like te brightness at about 75%.,

UPDATE: I’m not sure what happened. I played around with a few settings, installed firefox, and my connection is almost as good as the Sony laptop (2.4 Mbps down on [...] – as compared to 0.7 Mbps I was getting previously). Hopefully, whatever I did/didn’t do stays and the connection keeps. If not, I’ll either buy a new card or return the laptop. It’s very nice though…I’d hate to return it).

The other thing is the Synaptics touchpad driver included doesn’t support two-finger scrolling. Some people have downloaded a more generic Synaptics driver and have gotten the 2 finger scrolling to work).

UPDATE 2: I returned the original laptop I received and purchased another. I have had no problems with WiFi connectivity (may main issue with the original), indicating I likely just had a bum card. This lappie does have the Intel Wireless 1000 bgn card seen in many other laptops (vs. the atheros card – the ethernet card is atheros).

The loose keyboard panel is still in issue. I think it’s just way they’re manufactured. If you accept that, the keyboard is great. It is not backlit like the U20a.

It’s otherwise a very nice laptop, relatively light and sleek. I downloaded the synaptics driver from the synaptics site and now have 2 finger scrolling working without problem.

I’m giving this laptop 3.5 stars due to:

-5-6 hrs of battery life (wifi on, screen 50%) vs. 7-8 hours

-loose keyboard panel

-slightly sticky touchpad (too much friction)

UPDATE 3:

I’ve been using this lappie for a few days nows, and here are my thoughts:

1. I’m relieved that the wifi card is working fantastically, and that I probably just had a bum one in the first go arond

2. I’m consistently getting about 5-6 hours of battery life with wifi on, screen around 75%, 4-5 hours watching videos. I do wish the battery life was better. If there was a battery with a 55 wHr rating for $100, I’d buy it in heart beat.

3. The loose keyboard panel doesn’t bug me (though I should really call ASUS and have it fixed under their warrantY). Keyboard is otherwise great to type on.

4. The laptop is very attractive, relatively light, and I love the non-finger print magnet brushed aluminum finish on the lid.
Rating: 4 / 5

The UL20A is really nearly the perfect machine in its class. The power in this little thing is quite impressive, keeping in perspective this is not a full sized laptop.

If this is the size laptop you’re after it is hard to beat the features. The aluminum-like finish on the cover is so much better than all those glossy black laptops out there. The keyboard is a standard laptop keyboard layout, not the super squished layout of a netbook, and it has a great feel. The screen is bright a crisp. It also comes with a super small power brick. The thing gets pretty warm, but the size is just one more thing that makes this laptop so portable.

Fast boot. Wow, this thing is by far the fastest booting machine I have ever used. I replaced the hard drive with a Solid State Drive and I can literally boot to a usable desktop in Windows 7 in 30 seconds from power off. No kidding. Even my Core i5 desktop with Intel SSD doesn’t come anywhere near this speed. They have super optimized the BIOS to get passed many of the slow issues with bootup on most machines.

So the downsides. The lack of bluetooth and gigabit lan on a laptop in 2010 is just plain bad thinking. These are low cost items that should be in every single laptop on the market, period. Sure I can get bluetooth with a tiny usb dongle, but why should I have to? And 10/100 LAN? Come on, that is so mid-2000’s.

The touchpad is not the best design I’ve seen. It has small divets on the surface, but otherwise there is no way to tell when your finger has moved off the touchpad. Finding the scroll regions is particularly hard, though the new dual touch scrolling feature of the Synaptics software goes a long way to mitigating this. The touchpad takes some getting used to, but give it a chance.

Lastly, price. Paying 5 or 6 bills of this thing seems like a lot when you get can a full featured and high powered laptop for the same or less. But I keep telling myself it is small and in electronics you always pay for small. But still. If this thing were say $450, I’d recommend it to everyone I know.

Thinking about buying one? Go for it, you’ll not be disappointed.
Rating: 5 / 5