Asus doesn’t pop up around here all that often, but
when they do it’s because they’ve got something interesting, and that’s just
the case here. The Taiwanese company has revealed the adolbook14, what the
company is calling the world’s first metal gradient notebook. Asus is heavily
marketing it as a fashionable option, so let’s take a closer look.
Now, gradient colors aren’t exactly something.
They’ve been widely used for various products, most commonly smartphones.
According to Asus however, the adolbook14 is the first time any company has
ever combined gradient aesthetics with metal notebooks. Now, we aren’t 100%
sure of that, but it certainly looks nice.
The adolbook14 is equipped with either a 13.3-inch
or 14-inch 1080p 16:9 display that has a
4.1mm narrow frame and a screen ratio of 87.4%. The shell is coloured
with nano-scale water-based environmentally-friendly paint. It’s also fairly
light at 1.3KG, and it’s quite thin too at a mere 16.5mm. There’s a backlit
keyboard here too, which is always good.
There are decent options when it comes to I/O, even
considering the device’s thinness. We’ve got a 3.5mm headphonejack, an SD card
reader, a USB 2.0 port, a HDMI video out port, a USB 3.1 port and a USB-C port.
While the number of ports available isn’t all that impressive, the sheer
variety is pretty good.
When it comes to other specs, the adolbook14 is
equipped with up to a 10th generation Core i5-10210u processor. There are many
different configurations for the RAM and storage, capping out at 8GB of RAM and
a 256GB M.2 SSD. There’s a 72Wh battery, which the company claims can give up
to 20 hours of video playback.
The prices here vary depending on the variant
chosen, with prices ranging from 3599 yuan (US$ 502) to 4999 yuan (US$ 702). It’s actually
a decent price for a notebook like this from a decently big manufacturer. As
for how the adolbook 14 actually performs, we’ll need to wait until review
units start to pop up. They’re available from Asus’ JDmall store, so take a
look.
