ASUS Taichi 31 Review

Asus has developed a reputation for bizarre gadgets and whether commercially successful or not, it doesn’t shy away from innovation. The latest contraption to hit our markets is the Taichi, a dual-screen Windows 8 hybrid that debuted sometime last year. The Taichi can behave like a regular Ultrabook and even doubles up as a tablet when closed thanks to the secondary display on the top. Naturally, this being a one-off concept, Asus is charging a bomb for it. But is it worth the premium? That’s what we’re here to find out.

Design and build

The Taichi looks and feels exquisite and would easily be at home in a gallery of modern art. The lid is now home to a 13.3-inch full HD touchscreen and a 5MP autofocus camera. There’s also an illuminated Asus logo that lights up in notebook mode and a "Windows" logo that lights up in tablet mode. The notebook is quite slim, measuring 1.7 cm at its thinnest point, but is quite heavy. At 1.5 kg, the notebook feels very heavy when used as a tablet.

Exquisite design and build

In terms of connectivity, we have two USB 3.0 ports, headphone and mic combo jack, SD card reader, microHDMI and mini-DisplayPort. We also have a volume rocker, power/sleep switch and a rotation lock toggle. It would have been nice if Asus had incorporated a LAN port as well in the design. The base of the notebook uses an all-aluminium chassis, lending it a premium finish and also making it extremely sturdy. The bottom is completely sealed off and there aren’t any removable compartments for swapping the RAM or hard drive. The four rubber feet offer good ground clearance while keeping it firmly planted on your desk. The intake vents are underneath while the exhaust vents are near the hinge.

A Gigabit LAN port is sorely missing

Inside, we have plenty of space for your palms and a generously sized trackpad with finger-friendly buttons. The chiclet styled keys are backlit and very comfortable to use. There’s good amount of spacing and the tactile feedback is good without being noisy. There are three levels of backlighting for the keyboard, which you can switch through depending on the ambient light. We wish this would have been automated, though. The primary screen inside is also a 13.3-inch full HD display, but isn’t a touchscreen. Overall, the Asus Taichi is extremely well built and looks absolutely gorgeous. The notebook ships with a stylus and carry pouch as well.

Features

Asus sent its flagship variant of the Taichi, which is powered by an Intel Core i7-3517U running at 1.9GHz and about 4GB of RAM. For storage, we have a 256GB SSD, which should offer a good balance of speed and storage space. There’s no discrete GPU onboard so we’ll have to make do with the HD 4000 graphics. Windows 8 Pro 64-bit comes bundled along as well. Apart from Asus’s standard suite of apps, which includes their automatic updates and cloud storage, we also have a special Taichi control panel that can be brought up either through the Charms bar or via the dedicated button on the keyboard.

The Taichi UI can be activated at anytime through the keyboard or Charms bar

Asus has designed this to be touch friendly so you can very easily use it in tablet mode as well. The four options on the upper right hand corner let you switch to different display modes, as Windows treats the display on the lid as the second one. This lets you clone the display, so both are active at the same time or you can extend the desktop as well. The switching between displays is not as seamless as the press videos lead you to believe. It takes a couple of seconds when you close or open the lid for the other screen to switch on and even longer when you try to clone or extend the desktop. The Taichi console feels very laggy when you use it with the touchscreen. We weren’t too impressed with the stylus either, as it wouldn’t register our inputs very well. Overall, our experience with the whole screen switching was quite clunky and felt unpolished.

Performance

The Taichi 31 is easily one of the most powerful Ultrabooks we’ve tested so far. Most of this is thanks to the super-fast SSD under the hood. We managed to get some crazy read speeds of 483MB/s and equally good write speeds of 396MB/s. This was even faster than Asus Transformer Book TX300CA we reviewed a while back. Windows 8 runs smoothly without any hiccups and switching between applications is a breeze. Since this is Windows 8 and not RT, all your legacy apps work just fine.

The keyboard has even backlighting and the keys are easily visible in the dark. The keys also have a soft touch, so they aren’t very noisy and yet have good tactile feedback. The trackpad is quite generous and supports commonly used gestures for Windows 8 Modern UI. The two mouse buttons also mercifully require very less pressure to activate, keeping the pressure off your fingers.

Very comfortable keyboard

Audio quality is quite superb on the Taichi thanks to the Bang and Olufsen speakers coupled with Asus’s proprietary SonicMaster audio enhancements. There are two speaker ports on either side of the notebook, so you get clear stereo sound when placed on a desk or using it in your hands.

Battery life

Battery life was a bit disappointing as we managed to get just 1 hour 45 minutes in Battery Eater Pro. This would roughly translate to about 4 hours of real world usage. The notebook was set to "Balanced" mode, so switching it to one of Asus’s Power4Gear Hybrid battery modes would yield slightly better results.

Verdict and Price in India

The Asus Taichi 31 is clearly not aimed at the average joe. In fact, it’s probably a little too extravagant as a rich man’s toy as well. I think the video on Asus’s website sums up the demographic for the Taichi perfectly. The notebook is great if you’re in sales and need to impress some affluent client as the dual screen is best used in this scenario. Other than this, the Taichi 31 is a hard sell, especially at its asking price of Rs 1,39,999 for the Core i7 version.