X-bit labs

ABS Zensation Z3 Notebook Review (page 4)

Category: Mobile

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 02/25/2004 | 10:08 PM ]

Ergonomics

The cover hides the usual things: the keyboard and the quick-launch buttons are absolutely the same as in “big” models from ASUS. It is also a bad tradition that the letters on the quick-launch buttons on ASUS platforms are difficult to read, but you quickly learn them by heart.

The ordinary notebook keyboard fortunately has no “thin” keys here – all keys are big, you can’t miss them. A big advantage of ABS Zensation Z3 is its ability to disable the touchpad when you want to work with text or use an external manipulator, a mouse, for instance.

The four quick-launch buttons line up above the keyboard. They serve for launching the browser, for running the e-mail client, for switching between power profiles (it works if you have installed ASUS’ Power4Gear utility) and for disabling the touchpad.

By the way, the touchpad of Zensation Z3 is not an independent device, but just a sensitive area of the case.  This is a very important distinguishing feature of this solution, as you don’t have to bother about damaging the sensitive area anymore.

The touchpad is no match for a mouse in convenience, of course. First, its functionality is not so big: with the standard display resolution of 1024x768, the touchpad is its copy on a very small scale, so you have to shift your finger on the touchpad by a hairbreadth to move the cursor 5-10 characters along the text string. The double click becomes a problem, too. You can do it in two ways with the touchpad: just tap twice the fingertip you move the cursor with or use the imitation of the mouse buttons, which are located below. It’s hard to say what’s more difficult. In the first case, you have to tap your finger at exactly the same place, in the second, the cursor moves away. So you have to use your second hand, too, or place the hand over the imitation buttons before the movement.

This is of course a generic problem of the touchpad as a positioning device, rather than of this particular notebook. Regrettably, the standard accessories of the Zensation Z3 don’t include a mouse, but you can order it separately.

A slight change in the design of the scroll keys (a “rocker” instead of two independent keys) made them less easy to use.

I would like to dwell on the noise level separately. The noise factor is a strong point of ABS Zensation Z3. Considering that we’ve got a mobile processor, it shouldn’t heat up a lot. As a result, the active cooling system turns on only during the boot-up (for about 3 seconds) and in resource-consuming operations. Of course, we can only make guesses at what’s happening inside from the noise we hear. The processor seems to be cooled passively (with only a heatsink). Only when performing complex tasks (in our case, archiving, performance benchmarks, graphical filters functioning, RW-disc burning), the notebook turns on a pretty noisy fan. You can easily get along with it as you are not likely to hear it very often. So this notebook claims to be nearly noiseless.

The first and foremost noise source in this notebook is the DVD/CD-RW combo-drive. The notebook is very new, and the drive is a high-speed (read: noisy) one. If you often use the optical drive, think about installing a programmable speed limiter. Besides making much noise, the drive is vibrating frantically when working at its maximum speed (which is quite logical, though, but not quite comfortable). Moreover, the strange setup of the drive stops the disc after 10 seconds, which is only acceptable during software installations. When you are listening to MP3 music from the CD-ROM, Winamp runs short of the buffered data and accesses the disc and the disc starts spinning up again. We get a per-sample performance with pauses of several seconds between segments and a horrible case vibration. This is hardly any fun, but you can eliminate the problem with the help of an appropriate utility.