so we have kind of a unique unboxing today this laptop was already open when
I got it so we're going to do a reboxing so let's start with everything about it
because that's what we have in front of us this is the ASUS ul30a this is from
their thin and light Series so I guess why don't we just look at how thin and
light it is now the first thing that I noticed about it is that while it is
very thin impressively thin it's not actually that light ASUS has made some
compromises on this notebook in order to deliver the all day Computing experience
so this notebook actually has an 8 cell
battery in it so besides the fairly
decent spec you've got a core2 Duo su7300 13.3 in screen 3 gigs of RAM as
well as a 250 gig hard drive Wireless N all of that good stuff you have also got
considerable battery life to go along with it that's great another way that
they've achieved this long battery life on their thin and light series of
notebooks is by using a green LED panel so that's going to reduce your power
consumption a little bit and it's also going to give you a better quality
screen so ASUS talks about a couple other things on the front of their box
here first thing is they've got HD vision sticker here okay then they have
Cino inside sticker over here then they have that it has DDR3 up here ice cool
Palm rest that's kind of interesting so what they're basically saying is that
this part of the notebook where you actually rest your hands when you're
typing doesn't get that hot cuz that's a big problem that I've run into with
notebooks in the past is that it'll have like some kind of uh hot component sort
of right around here and so whenever you're typing your palm starts to get
sweaty and it gets kind of gross and it's not not that great okay so let me
see ASUS is also saying that they've got Health Assurance with this notebook
ultra low electromagnetic interference interesting okay so why don't we have a
look at the keyboard like most premium notebooks these days it's using a
chicklet style keyboard which while I'm not the biggest fan of everyone in their
dog seems to seems to like these so um
who am I to judge they've got a very very sensible layout to it here you can
see that all of the keys are in there correct and full-size locations for easy
access I have someone with relatively small hands I hate seeing a half length
backspace key because I I can't I can't hit it over there and actually keep my
hands on the keys so they've got nothing unusual or stupid on there and why don't
we have a look at the screen itself
so as we mentioned before it is a 13.3 in screen I don't actually have wireless
but I'm booted up into ASUS's Express gate technology so that is pretty much a
way of just getting right into whatever it
is you need to do so we can launch the web browser and you don't actually have
to boot into Windows 7 Professional which comes pre-loaded on this notebook
so it's kind of cool if you have your wireless setup then it'll actually work
but it's a little Linux based thing so you can use Skype chat on online games
music web I've never actually used
Express gate before even though I've had lots of products that have featured it
so yeah this is the first time I've seen it interesting okay why don't we have a
look at what this notebook has in terms of connectivity so I'm going to go ahead
and close it on the cameraman there on the top first of all we've got kind of a
brushed aluminum sort of finish and I took off a little sticker thing you've
got a silver sort of um embedded ASUS
logo that looks really really sharp so this is what you'll what it'll look like
when you're using it and people are looking at you see looks all stylish and
thin very nice okay so let's go and have
a look at what we've got in terms of connectivity first of all you've got an
air vent here so the fan is
exceptionally quiet I don't think that's realistically going to bother anybody
next you've got VGA more importantly you've got HDMI video out along with one
USB port on this side then moving around to the front you've got a couple of what
appear to be either speakers or air vents hold on give me a second here yeah
those are going to be speakers up on the front here then around on the other side
we've got an SD card reader you've got your headphone jack microphone Jack two
more USB ports gigabit Ethernet and a
power in so the connectivity is actually a lot like a netbook in that you've got
sort of three USB ports your network your sound and that's mostly it now one
thing that they have added obviously is the HDMI port and that's huge but what
you've noticed already hopefully is missing is an optical drive so you will
need to use an external optical drive if you want to use uh any sort of DVD or CD
media with this particular notebook now I'm going to go ahead and turn it off oh
the cameraman's looking at the multi-touch touchpad good job cameraman
so that's a multi-touch touchpad so you can use gestures it's uh looks like up
to three fingers which is pretty cool okay so why don't we take the battery
out because when you're holding this notebook you can easily tell that by far
the heaviest part of it is this side right here so ASUS in order to achieve
the 12-hour battery life that they've got with this notebook has designed the
battery to be a huge amount of the
actual size of the notebook so let me see how many wat hours so this is a 5600
milliamp hour battery rated at 15 volts If That Matters to anybody and um okay
let me see what do we have on the bottom here so on the bottom you've got easy
access panels to access the hard drive or the RAM and wireless uh upgrade
module so you can see the two sodiums that are installed right here and I'm
going to go ahead and assume the wireless is over there somewhere in here
is the hard drive so now we can actually get along to the accessories included
with this laptop so I'm not going to bother
putting back stuff like oh actually this is interesting though so isus talks
about their Global Warranty so 360° notebook service so you got a 2-year
Global Warranty that means you buy it in Canada you move to Europe you're still
covered a lot of companies companies won't do that two-way overnight shipping
for your uh for your 360° notebook service and then it also includes if you
register within 60 days of buying your notebook one year of accidental damage
warranty which covers drops fire spills and power surges that's pretty awesome
to be including without any additional purchase on uh on their notebooks so
then we can put the cardboard thingies back on the laptop itself here yeah if I
could make them fit then that would work really well why don't we just open up the box which I appear to have lost
there it is okay so let's see what we find inside here I'm going to go ahead
and guess that yes this is a power adapter so the power adapter is very
very small so since Theus is using Intel's lowest power CPUs other than the
atom you're only using a 2.1 amp power
adapter so this thing is just just tiny very convenient to carry around because
the last thing I want to see when I buy a low power uh thin and light notebook
is a huge bulky power brick that I have to carry around with it that's just
stupid so you got a power cable to plug into your power brick and then what else
do we have inside here we've got a Windows 7 Recovery media okay so they're
not using a recovery partition but they're actually including a DVD with
64-bit Windows 7 that's pretty nice and
then they've got some uh applications that you can use Aus DVD power to go
media show then you have drivers and utilities on yet another disc and
finally a recovery DVD ROM so
huh I'm not sure which one of these is the recovery DVD and which one of them
is the recovery DVD but this one's
sealed so maybe this is it let me open
that up find out what's in
here H Windows 7 to XP Alternative
Program oh I see so this must be Windows XP there you go so this maybe was back
when they were doing the Windows 7 downgrade or maybe they're still doing
it I don't know okay next we have
uncompromising performance one less than 1 in ultra slim so this is a little
sticker that was on the screen when this was new and sealed then we have a
notebook warranty card which is uh has the registration information that you
can cut out and send to Aus to get your one year of accidental damage
warranty Express gate manual so that
tells you how to use that software that I couldn't figure out how to use uh
right off the bat there so it boots up in only a couple seconds and then you
can do all of this stuff so you can pause that if you want to read it I'm
not going to read it out okay next we've got a cable tie so you can use that to
manage the uh the cables for your plugs
okay and then last but not least you have an assus users
manual and the users manual includes useful things like a picture of a
notebook as well as some safety precautions
and how to plug in your notebook PC okay
oh it also shows you some of the gestures that you can use for your multi-touch interface that's pretty nice
okay well thank you for checking out my unboxing today and uh thank you for
watching my video blog