Asus K42J: May "K" kaya?

Asus K42J may have a conventional design portfolio of other K series laptops, but the specs are enough to raise our eyebrows with wow gestures. But the question remains, "for a Php33,500 price point, may K kaya sya?" Does it wallop with wonder to compete with other Core i3 laptops in the market?

It is the latest addition to their K series computing workhorse. From the tradition of Asus K40IN, this one brims with ATI Radeon graphic card apart from the Nvidia chip of the former.

The looks department is a mixture of class and elegance with executive brown that that appeal for business users. The textured touchpad makes it devoid of fingerprint smudges. Although it comes in handy, the lack of scroll zone is a letdown.

Although not a LED technology yet, its 14inch 1366x768 resolution display produces sharp and vibrant images.

The Altec Lansing speakers though has an average speaker quality, so there's nothing to write home about it.

It has the usual port configuration as other laptops of its class which includes 3 USB Ports, 1 HDMI, 1 ethernet, and 1 VGA port. It also has an SD/MMC Card slot.

Above the lid is a 0.3 megapixel webcam that is not as stellar as the competitors because of its grainy cam quality, especially under a low light condition.

The processing power of Intel Core i3, coupled with the ATI Radeon's graphic performance is a lo and behold for this unit. It delivers definite computing punches because of its fast boot up time and application execution.

One caveat though is that it has one of the poorest battery life laptops in the market, only averaging of about 3hours for seamless computing with wifi and bluetooth on and 75% brightness setting. Well, what can you expect of ATI(or any AMD products for that matter).

Overall, while I am enamored for its blazing fast performance, battery life is a major trade off. And for a mobile professional like me who always work on coffee shops, battery life is a primordial soup of my business undertakings.