Asus has announced UK pricing and availability for its new UX305 13in ultra-portable laptop, with the Intel Core M-powered machine available for an impressively low price of £650.
The laptop, announced last year, was one of the first Intel Core M-powered laptops to be released into the wild, although it's since beaten to the UK market by the likes of Dell and Lenovo, who released hybrid devices towards the end of last year.
The UX305 measures just 12.3mm thick thanks to a complete lack of fans. The fanless design is made possible by the tiny power consumption of the Intel Core M-5Y10; it has a Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 4.5W thanks to its low clock speed of just 800MHz. The M-5Y10 is a dual-core processor, but thanks to Intel Hyper-Threading each core is given two threads, which will help when running more intense tasks. The chip can Turbo Boost to 2GHz when required, but it won't be able to keep up with this blistering pace all the time. Nonetheless, performance should be relatively sprightly.
£650 is an area of intense competition in the laptop market, but Asus has included a number of components inside the 1.2kg chassis that you'd expect to see on slightly more expensive devices. The Full HD touchscreen has a claimed contrast of 710:1 and NTSC colour coverage of 72%, which should translate to sRGB coverage upwards of 90%, which is better than the MacBook Air.
Battery life is claimed at 10 hours, which sounds realistic for such a low-power processor in such a thin chassis. Expect to have to turn the brightness down on the 300cd/m2 screen in order to get anything close to 10 hours, though.
There are three USB3 ports, and while there's no Ethernet port on the laptop itself, Asus will bundle a USB to Ethernet adaptor, although this will only support speeds of up to 100Mbit/s. There's also a Mini DisplayPort connector, and you get a Mini DP to VGA adaptor in the box.
There's also a 128GB SSD on board, which won't be enough for lots of media files but will swallow up your documents and pictures quite happily, although buyers may have to supplement it with an external hard disk or a cloud storage service.
The chassis design and colour are both new to Asus, and this time around it's called the dark grey scheme Obsidian Stone. There aren't any other colours available at the time of writing.
The Asus UX305 is available from various UK retailers from today and we'll have a full review once we've put one through its paces in our labs.