Asus W3J review

The W3J uses a 14-inch widescreen display, which like most of the other Asus laptops we've seen, is of a very good standard. It runs at a native resolution of 1,280x768 pixels, but suffers slightly from a limited horizontal viewing angle. This means colours may appear slightly warped when not watching from a central position. Some users may also take issue with the fact it uses a glossy coating. This enhances colours and contrast, but it can render the laptop unusable if used in direct light -- you'll either love it or hate it.

One aspect we couldn't fault was the 120GB Hitachi Travelstar hard drive. This provides loads of storage space for such for such a small laptop, so you shouldn't have much trouble stashing a comprehensive library of music or movies. The drive has a slow-ish spin speed of 4,200rpm, making it the cause of a minor system bottleneck, but most users won't notice any sort of lag during everyday use. The W3J has an integrated 8x DVD dual-layer rewriter drive. This in itself isn't much to write home about, but the drive can be used as an audio CD player without the need to boot up the laptop.

A laptop isn't much of a laptop without wireless connectivity and the W3J has that in abundance. It's an Intel Centrino model, so there's 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi capability, which in this case is supplemented by an infrared port and Bluetooth so you can transfer files and synchronise emails on a compatible mobile phone. The Bluetooth module uses the latest 2.0 enhanced data rate (EDR) chipset, which gives faster performance and range.

Also relatively pointless is the inclusion of an ExpressCard slot instead of a more traditional PC Card (formerly known as PCMCIA) slot. Whereas there are dozens of PC Card peripherals, including 3G data cards, there are relatively few ExpressCard peripherals. The situation might change in the future, but omitting PC Card entirely is slightly illogical, in our opinion.

Like most Asus laptops, the W3J doesn't ship with much software. You get a choice of either Windows XP Profressional Edition or XP Home Edition, plus Cyberlink Power Director V3 SE for editing movies, and Cyberlink Medi@Show, which can create picture slideshows and screensavers. Aside from that, there's little else to speak of.

Performance
The W3J is a capable performer, though it doesn't run as quickly as laptops such as the Blu-ray-equipped Sony Vaio VGN-AR11, which uses a slightly quicker processor. It clocked up a score of 2,969 in our PCMark 2005 test, which is low in comparison to the VGN-AR11's tally of 4,236, but still high enough to indicate it won't struggle with everyday applications.

What the W3J lacks in core processing performance it makes up for in gaming performance. Its ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 card helped it rack up a 3DMark 2006 score of 2,350, which is a tad more than that achieved by the Acer TravelMate 8204WLMi, despite both laptops using the same graphics card.

Battery life for the W3J was only average. It lasted 142 minutes during DVD playback in our MobileMark test, which is much shorter than the 231 minutes achieved by the Acer TravelMate.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Nick Hide