Not another glowing W2 review...

Now that i have your attention I will qualify the title by saying that in my opinion the W2 is a good notebook, but is by no means perfect.

My point of view: I am pretty particular about things, probably more than most, and am really conscious when things are right, wrong, or close. I’ve been following the notebook market for some time and researched diligently for about 3 months. I bought and returned two notebooks (gateway 8510, Toshiba m60) finding neither lived up to my standards. I wanted a notebook to be a workstation (web and graphic design), sometimes portable but mostly at home. My goal was to have a computer as functional as a desktop but less obtrusive. Aesthetics are important to me. Computing power (gaming etc) is a lesser consideration. The W2 is my first notebook. I have been using it for 2 weeks.

I understand that it is easier to criticize than to create. I won’t discuss all aspects of the notebook that could have been better because nothing is perfect. I will discuss things about this notebook that I consider to be ‘wrong’ and may affect some peoples decision to buy. I won’t spend too much time gushing as this has been done a few times in these forums. I am happy with this notebook – but not unreservedly so. There are a few nagging details that keep this notebook from being great, in my opinion.

The W2: This is a beautiful notebook, better than anything else I could find on the market. The screen is great. Build quality is great. It looks amazing. The machine is responsive and quiet. Its is a great mix of power and appearance.

Most damaging is the placement of the ports around the outside of the notebook – particularly the USB ports. The W2 has 4 USB ports – 1 on the left side at the front corner and 3 on the right side at the middle and front of the notebook. A touchpad is fine but a mouse is a must for me. Having cables running around the righthand side of the notebook is awkward. Adding to the clutter on the right add firewire /1394 and PC card slot. Having cables plugging in around the front of the notebook really lessons the beauty of the W2.

Continuing with ports the W2 has all its audio ports in the center of the front edge, 4 in total. Having headphone/mic plugs in the front of the notebook makes good sense. However, to take full advantage of the W2’s audio you need to run cables to your stereo – these ports would have been better placed toward the rear of the notebook.

By itself the notebook is a site of beauty. Once its plugged in…

My other criticism is the substitute remote in the XP MCE release of the W2. I will consider the original remote to be the standard. It can be stored in the PC card slot and uses the built in IR of the W2. I can’t comment on the functioning of the remotes as I haven’t used either. The substitute remote requires an external IR receiver that plugs into a USB port (see USB above). It may be more functional and have functionality required by XP MCE, but the choice to include this as a substitute feels like a band aid solution. Including a remote that does not take advantage of the notebooks native IR is ridiculous.

As I said at the start, this is a good notebook and the best I could find on the market. I just wanted to voice what, in my opinion, are significant shortcomings. It's too bad, because in this notebook ASUS was so close…

Stephen

 

The USB ports are placed pretty wierdly, I agree.

The front ports can also get annoying as well, but I thikn, for a 17" its more acceptable because they are never really ment for traveling and that an external KB should be used, since the screen is so big. And since it is quite a media center, watching TV from 10" away may be kinda close.

 

I absolutely agree with you all the way Stephen.

Another thing i really dislike on the W2, is the keyboard.
I feel i really have to be carefull when typing, to avoid breaking it.
The amount of flex on the space and enter key is extreme, and it feels cheap.

And the sound distorts now and then. Just a little fart here and there, but it bugs me.
I honnestly can't take the high praise the sound of this notebook often gets.
It's basicly has acceptable sound. Any talk about how the 'subwoofer pump out the lows' makes me shake my head. There simply are no low on such a small speaker. It's a center speaker, that makes the sound ok, and no more.

 

hmm, the thing is, I've handled and reviewed over 20 notebooks this year and this is the first that I can actually say was good. The last one before this that actually had me complimenting the sound was a now extinct Dell 9100 -- and that was over 20 months ago. I don't know if there's going to be a notebook out there that would meet your needs for quality of sound, you'd just have to go with external speakers and a 7.1 solution.

Cheap keyboard that feels like it's going to break? I'm not sure what leads you to say that, I don't feel that's the case at all.

As far as USB and port layout goes, design is always a tradeoff, since most every Asus machine uses the PowerBook-esque style screen that rides below the top of the base (see image)



Right side view of W2v ( view larger image )

and thereby saves on total height and looks a little nicer, obviously you're not going to be putting ports back there or you'd have the screen running into the plugs and wires when you open it, now that's what I'd call a mess. It has Bluetooth, so you can go with a wireless Bluetooth mouse or buy a typical wireless mouse and then the mouse + cable is a non-issue.

Design is always a compromise when fitting as much as possible into as small a space as possible, there is no perfect, I'm as high as a hill on ThinkPad's and their design, their engineers have been doing things for 20+ years with notebooks, but on the recent Z60t they're using a vertically alligned 3rd USB port which is weird, annoying and unintuitive on a laptop, but it's the only way they could get it to fit so what do you do? Take it off?

Yeah, it is easier to critisize, just have to remember that really.

 

The distortion is actually the soundcard doing it,not the speakers, and it's not on full volume, or anything like that.
It can happen in a game or, just when some beep, or pling sound plays in windows.
I don't expect amazing quality sound from the system without external speakers, and thats kinda my point exactly. When some people talk about the lows of the subwoofer, and how the sound is so wild it can hurt their ears, I really think someone needs to put it a little into perspective.

Sure, but just telling my opinion as a counterweight to those that think this notebook can do nothing wrong.

AND don't get me wrong, I really like my notebook, and I also like asus hardware.

 

I agree the placement of the usb is alittle strange and i would have like the audio ports in the back. Overal its a great machine. as for the remotes issue you have to blame microsoft for that. The reason they included the MCE remote is thats the only one that will work with mce it will not work with the built in IR port thats how Microsoft set MCE up. The inluded card remote works with the asus software. so its not really something asus could avoid its a OS issue.

 

My notebook comes with 2 remotes that works with the built in IR, and it comes with windows xp, and this was the way the mashines got advertised initialy.
I do believe that Asus made a little **** up, and created an emergency solution.
If i remember correct the hybrid tv-card would not work in USA, and they called the mashines back, or they got delayed, and then they then came up with this MCE solution, with the akward usb IR unit. So i think the blame belongs to Asus, and not Microsoft.

 

I've been meaning to post a similar thread for a while but haven't got around to it. Anyway since it's started here's my take on the W2 after a few months.

For a start as others have said overall I'm very happy with my W2. I think the design is very attractive. The use of materials is generally well thought out and the price is quite reasonable when you look at the combination of specification, design and included accessories.

Overall I think the build quality is very good. I do have a few minor criticisms though. The thin silver (plastic?) insert around the screen is a little loose. The power button on mine is slightly crooked too (someone else brought this up). The 'H' key keeps uncliping. This is getting kind of annoying but I need to get a US/English keyboard anyway so I haven't bothered to contact Asus about it. My PCMCIA remote hasn't worked since new. I've got to contact Asus about this. My screen backlight flickered for a while. It seems to have stopped now though which is slightly worrying. I just hope it doesn't resume flickering after the warranty has expired. There are also intermittent problems with slightly funny noises. I think other people suggested these are the chipset or something? It's not a serious problem, just mildly irritating on the occasions that they happen.

Criticisms aside though there are a number of positive points in relation to the build quality. The use of aluminium is superbly done. The anodising seems to be of very high quality and resistant to scratching. It's also excellent at dissapating heat which I suspect helps with the heat non-issue mentioned below. The CRP (carbon reinforced plastic) is much nicer than standard plastics used in other brands. Feels almost like a cast metal.

The heat (or lack thereof) is amazing, especially considering the specification of the components crammed into such a small space. The fan noise that others have complained about is really not much of an issue for me. Just try starting up a P4 desktop machine next to your W2 then tell me it's loud. The desktop has far more air volume inside to dissipate heat too so if anything the laptop should be louder. I personally think overall it's an amazing achievement.

The sound is acceptable which in my past experience is unheard of for a laptop. Maybe I'm being too easy on it (I'm certainly not claiming the sound is great or even that good by overall standards) but for a laptop the sound seems to be the best I've experienced. The only thing that I'm still hanging out for is the drivers that will correctly identify (and utilise) the sub woofer but for most things this is really not an issue too. If sound matters to you you're never going to be happy with laptop speakers anyway so just buy seperate speakers right at the start and save yourself a whole lot of angst.

The screen is very good. As others have pointed it doesn't seem to be quite as sharp as Sony's. To me it just seems to have slightly less contrast. Having said that I haven't compared them side by side and I've only looked at the Sony's in the shop so it's possible it was just the lighting. Laughably the screen is far better (and higher res) than the one I use 40+ hours per week for CAD at work.

The TV tuner seems to be much more picky about signal quality than even very cheap digital boxes or TV's. It's kind of frustrating because in my current house we have poor reception at best so my W2 doesn't receive anything at all. I'm going to whinge to the landlord and hopefully we'll get the aerial fixed. Fingers crossed this means I'll be able to finally watch digital Freeview on my W2. As mentioned above my small remote has never worked but I'm going to get that replaced soon. The larger one works fine however. Asus's Mobile Theatre software is fine but fairly unimpressive. It's very slow to respond at times and not particularly easy to use. I'm tempted to try Flyviews TV software to compare.

The optical drive seems fantastic. Fast burning and no disc failures so far. It's slightly noisy especially when loading and unloading but it's really a very minor problem. The only issue I've had is some discs with labels (the genuine XP with holographic label for example) cause horrible noises. Maybe they're out of balance or rubbing on something? Either way I took it out straight away and burned a copy instead.

Sorry about the scattered nature of these comments. I'm just typing as they come into my head. I might get motivated and organise them into a semi proper review soon but in the mean time I hope they're of some use to someone.

Phil
W2Vc-U005P

 

Yeah, I know what you meant, what I meant to say was the sound card + speakers won't achieve what you want so something like the Audigy ZS would be the only way you're going to achieve that in any notebook:

http://www.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=1&subcategory=204&product=10769

Oh well, discussion is good either way I guess, I just felt you were being a little harsh towards this notebook as I'm not sure what the alternative is you'd recommend as being better in comparison to the W2v.

 

I'm actually saying the sound is acceptable, exept for some distortion farts now and then. It should not be nessesary to buy an audigy card to avoid that. Something that is called high definition audio ought to be able to play pure.

I dont claim there is a better notebook at all. I went with the w2 coz it was the best i could find.
But again, there IS room for improvement, and there should also be room to voice your opinion, even when it comes to the negatives.