the skinny on the U1F

i couldn't stand the fact that all these "spec" sheets out there in cyberland just simply BLOW. I live in the states and bought my laptop shipped for $2175 US from Excaliberpc.com, which i have no affiliation with, they were pretty quick about shipping and the the cheapest i found, plus they're located in california.
That company, however, didn't give me the external burner, but that doesn't really bother me, since, i would prolly never use it.
Every supplier i inquired within the UK had horrible service and sometimes wouldn't even reply back.

The "integrated wireless", is actually using a PCI Express Mini Card slot, which i think is something they should advertise, cause I almost didn't buy this laptop for that sole reason. I took "integrated" to mean "on-board". I recommend an atheros AR5008 series card, if you can locate one. Please drop me a link if you know where to get one.

The hardrive is "Toshiba MK8009GAH ATA Connector" which is a 1.8" inch drive using a male ZIF connector. Which was really important for me to know as I will be replacing with a SSD. dvnation.com is the only place i know that sells these to consumers, if someone know another place, please speak up.

I also read in one of the reviews that some guy didn't like the fingerprint reader cause it got in the way of scrolling, well, he didn't read the manual... If you use the far right or very bottom of the touchpad, it'll bring up a little scroll icon, and autoscroll as you drag your finger.
You can also configure the fingerprint reader to use a software based scrolling program (I haven't tried to set it up yet, but it say's so in the manual).

and as far as the keyboard goes (since, all keyboards have their quarks), asus decided to smash the arrow keys where the right shift key is, which is the size of a regular character key thats to the right of the up arrow, and yes, it's f@cking agony, but i guess you can't have it all. I moved from an IBM X41 tablet and the keyboard is truly a good size to type on. This coming from someone that'll be running linux and OpenBSD (still waiting for an SSD).

The preinstall environment was surprisingly nice, i usually do a clean install, cause there's usually too much stuff loaded at start which i simply don't use, even services that are completely useless. I did do some customizing this time, but for the most part, the asus software is pretty useful. Some stuff like the Fn + F1 through F10 utilize a program that runs in the background to display some pretty icons that fade in and out, it makes it look pretty slick. I'd still take beryl any day.

as far as looks go, the piano finish case, is harder to clean of fingerprints then any other laptop screen i've ever owned.
the leather isn't distracting or obnoxious ( i like a "professional/business" look and looking flashy doesn't creat that kind of image ) and the chroming of the sides glint a bunch of light, which i kinda don't like. But the screen can brightened and dimmed to your delight, combined with Fn + C to change through gamma corrections ( asus has some trendy name for it, but i forget), make this a quite nice buy.

well, so far that mostly what i wanted to say. If anyone has questions or wants screenshots or anything like that, feel free to speak up. It is a pricey laptop...and a very dope....

 

All wireless cards in notebooks are mini PCI slots, there 'are' some that are soldered on, but there is less then an handful.

SSD should be compatiable, but due to the scarcity, I can't say for sure.

Great first impression, criticism and comments are always welcomed

 

It didn't ship with the external burner? Hmm, the fact that the U1F was supposed to ship with the burner instead of it being separate was what originally got me looking at it. I wonder if they'll be together at other sites.

 

OK this is really good to know. Thanks for letting us know, i had been wanting to know about this.

eBay is a great place for mini-PCI cards on the cheap.

SSD is very expensive (more $$ than the U1 itself. Probably not worth it.

Looks like you have the makings of a review here. Could you write us a full review of the U1F? We'd greatly appreciate it.

 

I have two questions if you do not mind:

1. How is screen readability when used outside?
2. How is battery life?

Thanks!

 

One question ... how is the fan noise? Does it run often and if so how noisy is it? Thanks.

 

From the top

Please note that mini PCI is different then PCI Express Mini cards, they're actually about half the size... or less. I don't think it's soldered on, though i didn't take it out, because i saw that their was 2 screws holding the card in. ASUS marketing should really tell people about this.

Some site's sell it for like $2400, maybe thats the one that come's with it...
I should mention that mine came with a 3 cell and a 6 cell battery and they gave me a bluetooth mouse. and that's about it.

Great question's, i haven't even taken this laptop outside yet and i haven't measured battery life either. i'll let ya know about this later on today.

I have been able to notice that the fan is kicking sometimes when it's dead silent in the room, but this laptop came with some pretty impressive power options. I rarely ever hear the fan , when i do it's a low hum. You can create various power schemes and restrict the cpu use down to 5% if you want and the screen has about 15 notches between the dimmest and the brightest setting ( i say this because i use the Fn + F5 and F6), of course you can use percentages when using the power utility.

As far as a SSD, y'all are totally right about it being pricey, it's gonna cost somewhere between $1200-$1400, but it's just one of those things that i just gotta have. I'm justifying it by telling myself i'll stick it into whatever new ultraportable, i buy in the future.

It looks like i might be writing a full review soon. we shall see.
i'll check back in later and answer the battery life question, it's like 6 am here in houston, if it doesn't rain i'll let ya know how it looks outside.

 

Be careful, as the lid scratches easily. I've learned to put mine in the sleeve everytime after I'm done with it. Does anyone know any products to remove or buff away minor scratches?

I also hate the lower right part of the keyboard... that shift key... grr..

 

Go to your local glasses store and pick up a microfiber cloth.

 

Interesting.

 

Yea the right hand side shift key is seriously drawing blood.
the sccreen is readable in direct sunlight if it's on full brightness, but the high gloss finish on the screen tends to do alot of reflecting.
in the shade it's a dream.
hopefully i'll be gettng a friend to do let me borrow a digital camara and then i'll have a full review on all the features of this laptop.
i'll post something on battery consumption tomorrow...
Thanx for the tip beny. BTW asus give's you a rag for cleaning the screen and one for cleaning the "piano" finish on the back of the screen.

 

How is the screen size by the way? I'm used to 17 inch LCD's so an 11 inch LCD seems like it would hurt your eyes reading small text.

 

Is that what that gray sheet is for? I know the blue one came in a pouch that mentioned it was an LCD cleaning rag... had no idea what the gray one was. I sat there like.. "hmm.. this thing is interesting... why did they give me this?"

 

None of the us u1f come with a burner. Its not that company that didnt give you a burner. Asus does not bundle the burner with u1f. For a closer look look at the video in the sticky above in the main asus section

 

That's what I thought, and a whole bunch of people dogpiled me and said I was wrong when I brought it up.

I really think it should be included in the base package, otherwise you can't even install more software on the laptop... I guess Asus NA sees the U1 as just a toy as opposed to something you would actually want to install some applications on an do some work out of the box.

 

Are you saying the U1F doesn't come with any means to read cds/dvds? In the European stores I checked, the U1F is listed as featuring a "External DVD Super Multi drive: 5X/8X/4X/8X/4X/24X10X/24x/8X".

 

It sounds like the European versions will then. The comments so far indicate that this is only the North American version that doesn't get the burner. But I agree, I think Asus should put the burner in the package. Few people can operate without a CD drive (especially at first).

 

It also seems the European version comes with a 80gb instead of a 60gb HD. It also sports 1gb ram instead of 1.5gb. Personally I would rather have had 1.5 gb of ram then the extra 20gb disc space.

 

Well, depending on the configuration, it wouldn't be very hard to upgrade the RAM to 1.5 gb. But, with Vista I would agree, 1.5gb is way better than 20gb of hard drive.

 

Does the U1F come with one or two expansion slots for RAM?

 

The American version has 1.5 gigs of ram and a 80 gig hard drive.

 

You lucky bastards If I end up purchasing the U1F I'll post here what the exact specs on the EU version are.

 

The 3 cell battery lasted me just under 2 hours under battery saving mode while i was using wireless and no bluetooth.
Is this what you guys get?
i'll post on the 6 cell when i get a chance
BTW i only saw one RAM slot
is the maximum RAM capped by the motherboard's bios?
i called dvnation and they told me SSD with this kind of connector won't be out for another month and i got no word on a price.
I think the grey rag is for cleaning the piano cover, well, that's what i use it for...
greets to my fellow houstonian.

 

hey, i know i was the one that mentioned that the fingerprint reader can be used a scrollbar, but the instructions in the manual arean't exactly the greatest....
has anyone been able to set this up? how?

 

Can I come over and take a look at your U1F?

 

Hmm ... your battery life is a bit awkward. Trusted Reviews got 3:15 on their battery test of the 3-cell battery. It's probably the wireless and bluetooth.

512 MB of RAM is integrated onto the motherboard. It's integrated system memory. Then there's a SO-DIMM slot available, which in the US is loaded with a 1 GB stick of RAM. That's what I get from the description the U1 on ProPortable's site:

 

If you cut the memory perforations, would you be able to fit a second piece?

I tried this with a Video Card before......

 

I can't imagine there is so much confusion on the specs and what is included in the box. I thought that Asus products were pretty standard around the world - if it says it comes with a mouse or bag, you'd expect that for every reseller - why would the optical drive be any different? Sounds like someone got cheated if they didn't get an optical drive. How would one expect to upgrade to the next version of whatever OS they run? What about reinstall discs? You can't expect the reinstall partition to be the end of it.

And the battery life on the three cell is pretty bad.

 

Different regional distributors bring in different configurations of the models.

No US vendor ever said it came with an optical drive. I brought it up, and a couple individuals (perhaps in the UK) said it did, but none of the vendors ever misled anyone.

 

Justin from ProPortable has said that it will come with a DVD drive, external.

 

Under two hours of battery life sounds pretty horrible. Could you maybe give some more info on your testing conditions? Did you put the screen on fuill brightness? Did you do a lot of intensive work on the computer while testing? Thanks

 

If you live in houston and wanna check mine out before buying one just drop me a line.
I got 2 hours by using the battery saving mode and whatever the default's are for it. The default's aren't set to the best settings tho. wireless and bluetooth (mouse) were in use and i was using bittorrent to down a bunch of stuff, while i was working using securecrt, firefox (120,000K! mem), and winamp w/ visualizations (BTW, one of the reasons i bought this machine was for the HD audio, which just ROCKS! I also use shure E5's, which i'm sure helps.)
that's it.
i'm gonna give it another try later tonight with my own power settings' prolly w/o the bluetooth and still the same programs.
i wouldn't consider my use as extensive use cause i used to do the same with my 1.5 centrino. It wasn't as snappy tho.
anyone figure out this fingerprint scrolling?
it seems the manual tells you to open a program that i didn't have installed from the get go. I already tried to see if asus would let be download it, but nope that didnt work either.

 

Thanks for the info fallout. Do you use the Asus powermanagement software (I think it's called something like 'Asus Power4 Gear')? I hear that helps with battery life as well.

 

Keep in mind that he is running Vista. Many people including myself see about a 10%-20% drop in battery life when moving from XP to Vista.

I am really interested in the U1 but I'm still concerned about fan noise.

 

so, i dropped the settings to the bare minimum of what i can live with ( 1% to 15% cpu and 7% screen brightness ) and i still got only 2 hours outta this thing. I did a video game install ( civilization 4) to do a comparison to my old intel 915. I also just installed an atheros 5006 card and that pretty much stmps on the intel 3945. i heard power consuption should be better, but we'll have to wait and see.i'm gonna go play civ 4 on my custom battery saving settings, with wireless on only. i'll let ya know how that goes.

512K of super Pi was finished in 25 seconds. my old 1.5 centrino did it in 29 seconds. Both were on full power.

 

Yeeach, even with the 3 cell battery, thats pretty low, ouch. That is with the 3 cell right?

I don't think Civ 4 will run that great at all, I know it barely ran on my old laptop with GMA 900 graphics.

Sounds to me like now I'm hearing more bad than good about the U1Fs? Their not that great after all? Can you name some good points about the laptop aside from its portability and low weight obviously?

 

well, civ 4 ran pretty decently, alot better then my old intel 915.
I bought this laptop because I was planning on running openbsd/linux on it and i didn't want to have a lot of compatibility issues, and the fact that this lappy has PCI Express mini slot pretty much makes my day (EVDO/HDSPA in the future). I run server's, so the brunt of my work is on other computers. this lappy weighs a lot less then any book i've had to carry for college, while still maintaining the biggest punch outta the rest of ultraportables. The screen on this laptop, simply blows away any other i've seen and the "splendid technology", which i thought was a complete marketing gimmick, actually turned out to be decent gamma correcting software, its pretty neat and easily usable through Fn keys. You can achieve very realistic color with this screen, for all the photographers in the audience. the HD audio is a big reason i went with this lappy, also. you just have to hear it to believe it. when i get my SSD harddrive i expect a decent amount of help to the battery performance, not to mention i prolly won't even be able to read my dmesg from my OS's booting up. I'm extremely happy with my purchase, this blows any other laptop i've had outta the water. I'm also the kind of guy that does a lot of hardware tweaking, so expect to hear from me in the future about how to modify/upgrade, alot of the internal stuff. I plan on keeping this lappy for a while and pushing it's hardware to the limit. I'm dying to take picture of the motherboard in this thing. Still working on getting a camara, so i can write a full review.

i'm gonna test the 6 cell battery and post my results later.
peace

 

I would like to know that as well.

 

It has one expansion slot. 512 MB is integrated onto the MOBO.

 

Please do! I'd like to find out, as well. Trusted Review's analysis of the U1 put the 6 cell battery at 5.5-6 hours.

 

i get three and a half hours out of my 6-cell, but the 3 cell just won't do anything over 2 hours with battery saving turned on. I'm wondering if asus or some 3rd party will release a bigger RAM module in the future, or if the RAM capacity is limited by the bios. I'm also confused about the RAM speed, on whether it's 533 or 667, today as i was looking for sticks of ram, i noticed that the one's for sale for this model are spec'd at 533.
i'm prolly gonna repartition the drive tonight and get openbsd and ubuntu installed. let's see how that goes.

 

Ouch. That's about half the battery life the trustedreview people got

 

Anyone else get this Laptop yet? From fallout's experiences my intent on getting this is more and more up in the air.

Also Best Buy is supposed to be selling this model but not in my area (Boston) has anyone seen this in store?

 

Same here. Especially the battery life could be a major issue. I would love to have someone else with an U1F give some more info on the battery life, there has to be an explanation for the fact that some users report ~3 1/2 hours battery life and others report ~6 hours.

 

Were both people doing the same things?

 

I have no idea. I've tried to reach the user Beny who has a U1F but haven't succeeded in that as of yet.

 

Hi,

Can anyone who owns this notebook provide feedback on whether or not it can handle Warcraft III, MapleStory, and Scions of Fate, and gaming in general? I'm thinking of replacing my Toshiba R100 with this. Warcraft III plays fine but a little choppy when there's lots of action, MapleStory causes some kind of rendering glitch so that there are some diagonal black bars on the screen, and Scions of Fate will install but won't show the log-in screen.

Thanks,
Jerry

 

i don't really play alot of games, so i definably can't help ya on that one.
Xubuntu went great, it detected everything and runs very smooth.
I'll hopefully get my SSD this next week, which should be nifty.
for now i'm about to go give xen ( http://xensource.com ) a try on this.
Before you guys give up on this lappy, you should try to spot one in a store, and check out the screen.

 

I'm curious about the SSD you are getting. What form factor (1.8", 2.5", or ExpressCard), and what size? Where from, and how much?

 

Haha yeah, when the U1F was announced, there was a lot of hype and lust over it but now that its actually out in the wild, it doesn't look that hot anymore no? What are the main reasons, the mediocre battery life for one, the optical drive is not included, anything else? I wish the lid wasn't glossy, I think glossy looks better than matte but not if it'll only be smudged up and I have to wipe it over 10 seconds and worry about hairline scratches and whatnot. Eh.

Overall, looks like a good ultraportable, but it does have its faults as do many other ultraportables, there's always much compromises in this level of notebooks.

But yeah, there was and still is a lot of hype over this notebook, but I think its overhyped a bit.