Asus ZenBook 14 OLED review: A premium laptop that’s brilliant

Asus has made a name for itself in the laptop segment in India with its quality products, and the ZenBook lineup has grown over the years. The company managed to raise its image from a mid-range model to a premium model, and the ZenBook 14 OLED launched in India this month continues to show the company’s growth path and product development demanded by consumers.

Asus manages to keep its sanity by offering the OLED ZenBook 14 for under Rs 90,000, which is quite an achievement, and you get it with an AMD Ryzen processor. How does Asus’ new premium laptop fare when you put it through your daily chores? This review will help you answer.

Asus ZenBook 14 OLED Review: What’s Cool?

Appearance is a big part of premium laptops, but Asus is doing something unusual that seems to work in a number of ways. The brand has chosen a subtle matte finish with a small Asus logo on the front.

The build quality of the laptop is undoubtedly solid, and some military-grade tests have been done to suggest that it can take a few drops and come away unscathed. However, Asus has managed to keep the weight at 1.35 kg even with the full aluminum body, which makes it portable.

The hinge unit of the laptop allows you to open it 180 degrees, which according to the company is one of the many demands of consumers in this segment.

Open the laptop’s lid and discover ZenBook 14’s vivid 14-inch 2.8K OLED display with slim bezels housing the Full HD camera. The colors on the screen are sharp, and thanks to the OLED panel, you get it with a glossy screen that offers a 90 Hz refresh rate. Asus has got the Pantone screen validated, which means that the color reproduction is the same as with other devices in the segment.

Asus has added a fingerprint sensor to the power button and kept the eject button on the far right to avoid accidentally turning off the laptop. Now when it comes to performance, you have an AMD Ryzen 7 processor paired with 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB of SSD storage.

Asus focuses on business consumers, so the lack of gaming is unlikely to scare away buyers. The keyboard layout is wide, and the travel feedback of the keys provides a comfortable typing experience, and we did not encounter any wrong movements when using the machine.

We got the top-of-the-line variant with 1TB storage which costs over Rs 1 lakh, but the price tag is warranted for the given features.

The new Ryzen 7 chip is built on a new architecture that promises better performance with better power efficiency. And we noticed the difference due to the hardware last week with the laptop. You get it with 75W charging support that uses the USB port, and Asus says you can also charge it with other chargers (but slower).

You’ve got a host of connections, including a headphone jack and a microSD card reader (yes, even those), so you’ll never feel like something’s missing from the feature list.

Speakers are another strength of this laptop and Asus has made it standard now.

Asus ZenBook 14 review: What’s not so cool?

While we think the design is high, we didn’t like how easily it smudges. The last thing you want is to buy a laptop at this price and clean it every now and then.

The trackpad is huge and gives you enough room to move around, but there’s no denying that the numeric keypad needs to be more efficient in its use case.

The Rs 1 lakh+ laptop doesn’t come with a powerful graphics card, which means usage is limited to casual gaming. We would have liked to see a powerful GPU so you could take advantage of all the power under the hood.

Asus ZenBook 14 review: Should you buy?

The ZenBook 14 still enjoys the premium tag that Asus has given it for the past few years. A Rs 100,000 plus laptop is asking a lot and we think this laptop will fulfill most of your needs. It runs on Windows 11, an AMD Ryzen 7 processor and offers up to 1 TB of SSD storage.

All of these combine to give you smooth performance, albeit with noticeable heating during extra exertion. The speakers and connection ports will keep you happy, and the rugged (military) design ensures you don’t have to worry about it getting damaged easily. Worth buying in a space where performance and portability come at a premium, but delivers with a bang.

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