Copied and pasted from bestbuy where I originally posted the review. check their prices, when i bought this laptop, they beat Amazons price.
What's great about it: Quick boot up times, touchscreen is great, keyboard is good, sound is amazing, size is great, ports are fantastic
What's not so great: Slight flex in keyboard (bearable), not the best button placement of cd drive, not as high build quality as say.. Asus
I received this laptop as a graduation gift for college, and I want to go through my experience with my purchase and use of this laptop.
Due to the nature of my schedule this year at the end of the semester I had obscene amounts of free time in my classes, so I dedicated much of the time to researching laptops so I could get the perfect laptop for me for college. I originally thought that I was looking for an ultrabook style laptop for my college years, and I looked heavily into all the offerings from Asus Acer HP and the like, and did not find what I was looking for, I liked the slim size and quick SSD performance, but everything I found that was in my price range was either skimping on specs or ports or build quality or otherwise, so I broadened my scope to laptops in general hoping to find something that met me half way between sexy ultrabook and chunky laptop. so wrote out my list of required spec I was looking for in a computer, and a list of wants and stuff like that, and started looking at normal laptops, and came across this one -
I fell in love with it, it was everything I was looking for, size, processor, lit keyboard, Asus build quality, two usb 3.0 ports!, 8 gigs of DDR3 RAM.. I was hooked.. however it failed in two points, and for me, they proved to be large points. The first thing that didn't get my seal of approaval were the lack-luster speakers. looking at the device you can not see the speakers at all, as they are bottom facing ( I will never understand the reasoning for why so many companies do this, its moronic) and shoot the sound directly into the ground. I am a big music guy, and I wanted good sound. the sound on the Asus is "hearable" but not what I was looking for. it also does not have a touch screen which at the time I didn't bat an eye at, who in their right mind puts a touchscreen on a laptop? so anyways I was almost bought the Asus, but I decided to look around some more and see if I could find one with matching specs and better sound. So a little more looking and I came across this one, I was a little sad that it dropped down to the i5 processor, but other than that all the specs were the same as the Asus, but for two big differences. one. harmon kardon. and two. touchscreen. If you are like me and had never heard of Harmon Kardon speakers before seeing it in this product then let me assure you, they make fantastic notebook speakers, the sound on this device is incredible, I first tried it by playing an intense orchestral piece, and was blown away with the clarity and the volume of the sound, it is truly fantastic sound.
Now on to the touchscreen. before using it, I thought a touchscreen laptop was maybe something that I would use once and never touch again (pun somewhat intended) but I may or may not have ever been more wrong in my life. I love having a touch screen. the first time I tried it I was not convinced, but after having it longer and getting used to all the windows 8 gestures and such, I have trouble going back to computers that do not have a touchscreen. Windows 8 does a really good job of making not just recent windows applications work with touch, but making almost all of everything work really well with touch input. (you will however come across the occasional odd application that doesn't like the simple scroll gesture and this is annoying to be sure, but not the biggest issue and I am sure it will be addressed eventually).
The keyboard. The keyboard looks fantastic. the back-lit keys are perfect and do their job perfectly, with options to turn the feature always on, always off, or on a timer to go off after around 15 seconds of inactivity. There is, as previously mentioned, slight flex in the keyboard that is not a hindrance to typing, especially if you do not look at the keyboard ever while typing, but if you still look at the keys as you type you will definitely notice the flex of the keys. not a big issue, but somewhat annoying. above the keyboard their are your typical assortment of media control keys and such. these are very useful, they share the f1, f2, f3 etc.. keys but are default as the obviously more important media control buttons. you can switch this if desired.
The ports. this laptop has three USB 3.0 ports which is awesome. if that looks like jargon to you, its nothing complicated, 3.0 supports much higher speeds than 2.0 does. they are also blue. blue is cool. included also is both VGA and a full sized HDMI cable which is nice, allowing you to operate both new and old projectors/tv/monitors/whatever without the use of an annoying dongle.
random final notes.
this laptop is not silent, but it is fairly quiet. I have yet to be disturbed by the fan sounds at all.
I have yet to get this laptop hot, however all I have done is the typical Word/youtube/facebook/gmail/minecraft activities so I can not actually attest to how hot it gets.
note. this laptop does not have much video memory at all, so graphic intense games are not going to work well if at all.
note. this comes with a lot of preinstalled junk. annoying.
note. this does come with a free year of the new Microsoft suite 365 for a year. nice.
overview.
this is a very good laptop, I love the touchscreen, I love the sound, I love the ports, I really like windows 8, I really like the speed, i like the track-pad, I like the keyboard, I do not like the
This product is...
Good sound quality A touch pad that works great Perfect for Business A nice compact size easy to set up great touchscreen slightly flexy keyboard
About me...
Budget Conscious Basic web surfing & emails Student Technology guru Social media enthusiast music lover
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