Asus UL50AG Reviews

Thursday, November 12, 2009, 12:29
Laptops
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The ASUS UL50AG is a latest addition to the line up of affordable and thin laptops. In this category, you have very expensive laptops like MacBook Air and the Dell Adamo. But the manufacturers like Asus and MSI are offering cheaper laptops that run on slower processors. These laptops don’t offer optical drive, which is the main reason behind their thin size, and they are more energy efficient as the slower processors use low amount of energy.

The ASUS UL50AG measures 15.2 inches wide, 10.2 inches thick and just 1 inch high. It is fairly lightweight in its category at just 5.6 pounds and 6.0 pounds with AC adapter. Priced at $729, the UL50AG comes with 1.3 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 ULV CPU and 4GB, DDR2 800 MHz memory. The laptop is equipped with Mobile Intel GM45 chipset and Intel GMA 4500MHD GPU. The laptop has very spacious hard drive, which provides storage of 500GB and spins at 5400 rpm. It comes with preinstalled Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit operating system.

The overall design of UL50AG looks quite similar to its smaller sibling, the ASUS UL30A. Unlike its smaller sibling, the UL50AG comes with optical drive. Both laptops provide a performance which is not at par with a Core 2 Duo processor. However, the UL50AG provides longer battery life, has quite similar design to UL30A and is priced lower than UL30A. As the features, UL50AG comes with two booting options. For these two booting options, the laptop has two start up buttons. One button launches the Windows 7, the other one launches Express Gate Splashtop OS environment. The Express Gate OS allows you to do essential works like e-mail and web browsing without launching the Windows 7.

The UL50AG has a 15.6-inch screen, which has 16:9 aspect ratio and 1366X768-pixel resolution. Due to the small size of the laptop, the display looks quite large. The text and graphics looks bright and vibrant.

Like any other 15-inch laptop, the ASUS UL50AG offers all the necessary ports and connectors such as, VGA-out, HDMI, Stereo speakers, headphone/microphone jacks, 3 USB 2.0, SD card reader, Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and DVD burner. However, there are two noticeable omissions- Bluetooth and ExpressCard.