We’d been waiting on this one — the Zenbook is finally getting a refresh. And for whatever reason, Asus has decided to cover one of the prettier ultrabooks out there in a sheet of Gorilla Glass. Which, hey, sure.
The Zenbook U301X and U302X have the upgrades you’d expect, mainly being the new fourth generation Haswell processors from Intel, and the Iris graphics that go along with them. The U301X has the highest end integrated graphics available in Haswell, and the U302X has a lower end configuration, but comes with a 2GB Nvidia GT730M card.
The new models will come with a 13.3-inch screen at 2560×1440 or 1920×1080 resolution. The U301X is 325x226x15.5mm, while the U302X is just a little thicker at 17.2mm. They weigh 1.38kg and 1.5kg, respectively.
But really, we’re excited because we’ve always liked the Zenbook, and just wanted it to get its act together on the trackpad and durability issues we saw, and that were common complaints among users. And this is the year everyone’s getting their act together on trackpads — and Gorilla Glass isn’t the worst way to notch up your durability. We haven’t seen this thing in person just yet, so the glass may well be garish and awful in person, but we’re willing to give it the benefit of the doubt for now. We’ll keep you updated.
Pricing and availability aren’t out yet, but are apparently coming later in the month.
Asus also has updates to the Transformer tablet/dock (2560×1600 display), the 8-inch and 10-inch Memopad tablets, and a gigantifying of the sleekish 5-inch Fonepad to a 6-inch monster. Those are basically expected, and we’ll let you know how many of them make it Stateside (probably not many).