Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Asus has done a pretty good job of taking everything good about an ultrabook and a tablet while leaving behind most of the bad things. If you were looking around for a crazy-thin ultrabook, do yourself a favor and take a look at one the Asus TP500 models (currently there are three). For most people they make more sense. Why? Well once people get past the "ooh that's cool" part of owning an ultrabook, they start getting annoyed that they have no DVD drive, can't plug in a network or HDMI cable without an adapter, a scaled down keyboard and not enough USB ports. With the TP500's Asus has given you an extremely thin laptop but the only thing they sacrificed is the DVD player. Something most of us can live without thanks to the prevalence of digital media from Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and others. I previously had an Asus Zenbook, and I can think of no computer I hated as deeply. It was incredibly thin and feather light, but it might as well been a doorstop for all the good it did me. It was just too slow with throttled graphics (because there was no room for a fan) and nowhere to connect anything. When I first picked this Flipbook and saw how they had oh-so-carefully bumped out the bevel in one spot to make room for a RJ45 LAN port, my faith in Asus was restored. Okay so who should buy one? Well this is an excellent laptop for home or school use, as long as you don't have big expectations about playing high-end 3D games. Being able to flip it over into pure-tablet mode is really nice when you just want to relax on the couch. It automatically detects which mode you are in (tablet or notebook) and disables the keyboard and touch pad. There are few things to love about Windows 8, but for tablet use, the "Metro" interface is pretty nice. And with Windows 8.1 it becomes reasonably usable as a PC operating system. In fact the first thing you are going to want to do is plug this in and download all of the Windows 8.1 updates in order to get basic necessities like an "X" button for closing programs. Left on its own it will take a few days to do it. However if you got to SETTINGS --> Change PC Settings --> Update and Recovery --> Check Now, you can hurry this along. How well is built? I'm an engineer and work in high-tech. I have PCs, laptops and tablets cluttering up the house. I've torn down pretty much every kind of consumer electronic device there is along with countless pieces of communication and avionics equipment. From that I can say with some confidence that you will be hard-pressed to find better build-quality in this price range. This laptop is solid. The hinge is especially solid - which is really important, because it's just a lot more fun to flip the screen over and use it as a tablet when you aren't doing "serious" work. The screen looks nice, but that's pretty standard these days. What isn't standard is that you are getting a proper 1920x1080 display instead of a cut-down 1366 x 768 display. It's powered by the respectable Intel HD 4400 hundred graphics. It's not for hard-core gamers, but it does well at everything most people will want it to do and it will do so without using a lot of battery life. Speaking of battery life I'm getting 3-6 hours depending on how I use it. I tried leaving it in standby for two days and came back to find pretty much the exact battery life I left it with. I still wish Asus had an option for a better battery than the 3 cell 48 watt hour this comes with, but thanks to advances in CPU, graphics, and screen design, 3 cells is actually pretty adequate here. Asus brags about the sound and it's pretty warranted. The Toshiba Qosmio line has *much* better audio, but then again it cost more than 2x as much. For the price, the audio is pretty darn good. Far better than 95% of the laptops I have owned. As to the CPU: the Intel Core i5-4210U 1.7GHz is the "middle" processor option (there is an i3 and i7 option for the TP500 series). For notebooks the i5 is my CPU of choice. Yes the i7 has more cores, but most users won't need them, so why pay for them? Here you have 2 cores that can run 2 threads each. That's four threads running on an Intel 22nm Haswell Core. That means you can surf the web or watch a movie and the virus scanner can hum right along in the background without you ever noticing. And for most people that's just perfect. More importantly the max TDP is 15 watts. That's probably 3x less than your old laptop. That means no hot lap ever. And of course better battery life. Overall the only thing there is to complain about (at this price) is dealing with Windows 8, which as I mentioned before, becomes much more useable once you get the updates in. In short by making it just a few mm thicker than an ultrabook Asus was able to produce a really functional 2-in-1 hybrid at a very reasonable price.