Asus UL20FT 1A in the flesh

Last time, I was looking at the Acer Aspire TimelineX 1830T over at Amazon but my friend who’ll be carrying it back home has postponed his trip so I left the item in Amazon’s cart for the meantime. Then I saw this 12-inch Core i3 ultraportable, the Asus UL20FT, and thought maybe I’ll just settle with this one for now.

So, I forked out SGD$899 (Php29,700USD 506INR 42,905EUR 482CNY 3,686) the other week in Singapore on this Core i3 ultraportable Asus UL20FT. I used to own its predecessor, the UL20 running a Core 2 Duo SU7300 1.3GHz, but has since sold it mostly due to battery life performance (around 4 hours).

In most respects, the Asus UL20FT sports almost the same design and form factor as the first Asus UL20 we reviewed many months ago here.

The original specs of the Asus UL20FT only included 2GB of DDR3 RAM and 320GB of HDD. I had to upgrade it to 4GB of RAM and replace the internal HDD with a spare 500GB I have at home.

The battery capacity is still the same, a 6-cell 4400mAh Li-Ion and still only does around 4 hours but considering I’m already running a Core i3 system in a thin and light notebook, it’s a fair trade. Of course, a 5200mAh battery similar to the one on the Asus Eee PC 1215N would have been nice.

Here the complete specs of the Asus ULFT-1A I got:

Asus UL20FT-1A
12.1″ display @ 1366×768
Intel Core i3 330UM ULV @ 1.2GHz
4GB DDR3 RAM (up from 2GB stock)
500GB HDD (up from 320GB stock)
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator HD
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth 2.0
HDMI port
3 x USB 2.0 ports
Card Reader
Windows 7 Home Premium

Full review later this week but if you’re curious, the UL20 review I did earlier is already a preview of what this one will turn out to be. The model is not yet available in the Philippines but my guess is that once it’s launched, expect the price tag to be north of Php38k, just like the first UL20 before it.