Serious Styling, Decent Performance

The lid of the ASUS Bamboo U6V is made of bamboo, which gives this laptop a unique artistic feel. Once you open the lid, the palm rest as well as the trackpad are both made of bamboo. Though there is a slight noticeable difference between the wood used on the palm rest and the track pad. The response of this trackpad wasn’t great. Even the buttons on the trackpad are made from bamboo, but they lack feedback. A USB mouse, also made of bamboo is included. The keys on the right of this keyboard, such as the arrow keys, get squished. The layout on the Dell Studio XPS 13, for example, is better. Of course, there are no unusable keys, and the keyboard feedback is decent.

The Bamboo Comes with a bright 12 inch, 1280×800 WXGA LED backlit display. The viewing angles on this laptop are not very good though. With the Intel Core 2 Duo P8600, 4 GB of DDR2 memory and an NVIDIA 9300M GS graphics, benchmark reults from PC Mark 05 (5141), 3D Mark 05 (3184), SiSoft Sandra, Cinebench (4662), Doom 3 (93 fps) and Far Cry (189.69 fps) were very promising. The Dell Studio XPS 13, in comparison, had scores of 88.2 fps in Doom 3 and 164.12 fps in Far Cry. The 4800mAH battery pack supplied with this laptop sticks out from the rear of this laptop but lasted for a total of 2 hours and 10 min, which is good under high performance mode with full brightness.

The ASUS Bamboo U6V is unique. It’s compact and weighs 1.57 kg and the performance of this laptop is also good as is the hardware it packs. So if you’re looking for something that is light, will make many heads turn and at the same time has some great hardware.

Specifications:

Core 2 Duo p8600 @ 2.4 GHz

12 inch WXGA LED Backlit Display

4 GB DDR II (2GBx2)

NVIDIA 9300M GS 256 MB

1.57 kg