Asus Bamboo Series UJ33c laptop review

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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Overall score

80%

9 Design

9 Performance

8 Battery life

8 Price

Publisher: Asus

Developer: Asus

Platform: Intel

Genre: Laptop

The sad part is that often very little of it is actually for the better, once you look into the resource costs of production of the new technology, and not to mention the costs of adoption as passed on to us, the consumer.

Luckily the ICT and tech field seems to have been partly overlooked by aggressive lobbyists and environmental groups allowing the sector to move more gracefully into the modern, eco-conscious age which seems to be what Asus are doing with their Bamboo Series. 

Besides improving battery life and overall energy efficiency, largely thanks to Intel’s clever multi-speed Core i5 processor and some software, Asus’ latest ecological must-have, is also covered head to toe in wood. Bamboo, in fact.

It’s not overdone really. The back of the LCD is natural, as is the entire palmrest area on either side of the touchpad. The idea, of course, being that it saves on that particularly eco-unfriendly construction material, plastic. And it looks and feels quite stylish too, having that lovely warm feeling wood does rather than the biting cold of plastic or metal.

It doesn’t feel all that fragile either – the bamboo finish proving quite resistant to incidental scratches as well as finger marks which is nice, and the hinges are good and solid. The 13” screen appears surprisingly tiny, but is still more than you get on a netbook.

Accordingly, the battery lasts well for a notebook, providing about half the life of a little ‘un with a 6-cell pack at 6 and a half hours working in Word, Outlook, and a few browsers. No optical drive also helps this result, but in compensation you do get an enormous 500GB HDD for storing all your multimedia locally.

There’s also an impressive 4GB chunk of RAM for feeding that data-hungry Core i5 M430 CPU. Running stock at 2.27GHz, this processor of course includes the Intel Turbo Boost trickery, and can clock itself up by two 133MHz bins to 2.53GHz when needs be. For a machine like this, likely to run word processors and mail the way I used it, that is plenty of horsepower, plenty of RAM, and more than enough storage space.

Unfortunately gamers aren’t going to be the most pleased with this little Asus. It does include the excellent NVidia 310M mobile graphics chipset, based on the latest version which sees the core clocked down slightly to 606 MHz but the frame buffer size increased to a promising-sounding 1GB.

But Asus has decided that, to keep the Bamboo as battery-friendly as possible, this frame buffer didn’t need to run at the full 790 MHz, and instead clocks it down to 667 MHz. The lower clock combined with the lower frequency of the RAM make the extra frame buffer pretty worthless, as gaming performance is noticeably hindered.

Asus do offer a comprehensive range of insanely overpowered “gaming laptops” as well however, so it’s unlikely purchasers who choose the Bamboo are going to be looking for a high end gaming machine.

It’s a bit of a strange one this U33Jc. It scores well for style, well for overall performance (for its intended market), and well for its good battery life. It isn’t particularly innovative, and seems to take a stance in-between netbook and fully-fledged notebook, but for a notebook’s price. The battery is good for a notebook, but the lack of optical drive and small screen almost make you want to put it against a netbook, where it doesn’t fare quite so well either in price or battery performance.

It does pack some excellent hardware overall. There’s that Core i5 CPU, copious RAM and drive storage, and a decent if partially crippled GPU on-board. There’s even USB 3.0 which is nice. All clothed in a pretty stylish, “natural” vibe which doesn’t detract from the overall build quality in the least.

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