There’s a certain childish glee in getting to use a laptop that had a screen that’ll bend pretty much any way you want it to. It’s kind of a dead giveaway that this is the sole selling point of the Asus UX360CA, besides the fact that they combine a top of the line 13.3 inch touchscreen tablet with an incredibly slim keyboard and user console.
At first glance, and we got the gold tinted one, the flip-top is a real beaut. Between the slimness of the whole unit (its 17.4 inches in length which is extremely competitive), and the steel finish that they’ve managed to put on it, Asus may have a rare winner in their otherwise clunky line of ‘heavy looking’ laptops. Mind you, this one isn’t a flyweight – it feels a wee bit heavy as it weighs in at 6 pounds, but it’s still nifty enough to be carried around. Especially in the soil black case that they throw into the package.
Under the hood, it’s quite an impressive performance array for something this size. The 500 GB HDD may seem a bit undersized but given that this may never be your primary PC, that’s sort of a bittersweet thing. At first use, the performance is smooth and seamless as the Intel Skylake Core M3 processor whizzes through the motions. Routine functions aside, it has 8 GB RAM packed in to ensure that even if you were to try the average windows game, there won’t be too much of a lag.
What’s truly awesome about the whole flip-top is that after 2.5 hours of use, with the battery almost at the end of its tether, the screen barely emitted any heat. At a time when exploding batteries and excessive radiation are almost mainstays in the phablet biz, having a decide that’s as cool as ice after hours of use is strangely reassuring. For everything else, flip it around and the world will go right round.