Digital Trends

Asus M70SA-X2

July 7th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Battery Life

Yes, we know notebooks like this aren’t designed to be run on their batteries for extended periods, but we still test it to give you an idea of what you can expect if you find yourself away from a wall-socket at some point. The M70S comes with a large 8-cell battery, which is unusual as we typically see 4-cell and 6-cell batteries most of the time, but bigger is always better when it comes to batteries. To test it, we put the notebook in its battery saving mode and watched a DVD until it shut off, which in this case was a decent one hour and 47 minutes. This is quite good, and almost rivals the one hour and 58 minutes we got from the Gateway P-6860FX we tested recently.

Conclusion

To be honest, we never quite know what we’re going to get from Asus when it comes to notebooks, but this time around we’re pleasantly surprised. The M70S has good looks, decent performance, and more input/output options than we’ve seen on any recent notebook. It’s relatively affordable too at just $2,199 USD, and its terabyte of storage is awesome despite its bizarre partitioning scheme (which could be easily rectified in Vista). Overall we like the M70S a lot, and though we’re not awarding it an Editor’s Choice award it’s still a very good notebook, especially when it comes to watching HD movies.



Pros:

• Terabyte of storage
• Blu-ray drive
• Great for movie watching
• Wide range of multimedia connectors/outputs

Cons:

• Touchpad controls can be annoying
• Not a gaming powerhouse
• Hard drives are configured with four partitions