The sheer scale of the Asus Zenbook U500 is quite a surprise when you first open it up - we're used to seeing thin and light laptops, yes, but not at this 15.6-inch screen size. We'd argue that its size means it isn't truly portable. It's more like a desktop replacement to have around the home; one that's light enough to use on your lap, or carry between different rooms. It's powerful too, and immensely sturdy, with an exquisite aluminium finish that follows on from the other Zenbooks Asus has released over the last few months. We really liked the Zenbook's keyboard; Asus has chosen to move away from the shiny and frankly diffi cult-to-use keys seen on the original Zenbook UX31. The inclusion of a numeric keypad will be useful for some, but we found it annoying - we're not used to those extra keys being there on a laptop. The core specs are superb, with a quad-core 2.1GHz Intel Core i7 processor, Nvidia GT 650M graphics and 8GB of memory. However, Asus has chosen to only include a 256GB of flash storage. That means the U500 is quick, but doesn't have the capacity for a vast archive of photos and videos. Hours of powerAsus quotes six hours of battery life for this laptop, but we'd say that if you're using it for a decent amount of work then you're looking at around four hours. That's not unreasonable, though it's not in the same league as many smaller, less powerful Ultrabooks. The high definition 1,920 x 1,080 IPS screen is, without doubt, high on the list of power-thir
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