OcUK Professional W540 UltraNote 14″ LED Ultra Book Review

The whole point of an ultra book is to be highly mobile, a system to get your work done on the go, without fear of the battery dying on you after two hours. Keeping the system on standby all day proved no problem what so ever for the OCUK Ultra Book and with almost instant boot times from standby, or 5 seconds from cold boot you’re never waiting long to get to your desktop.

Having been to iSeries i49 and Gamescom in the same week, I needed the flexibility, performance and longevity that the OCUK Ultra Book was promising, so I was really depending on it on a daily basis for all out event coverage, news articles, social media work, emails, sending out news letters, Photoshop, writing reviews, everything had to be done on this for the full week with only 4-6 hours of charging time being available on an evening while I slept.

Fortunately the ultra book didn’t let me down once, the battery held up wonderfully for a full day on standby, giving me 6 hours of actual usage time with ease and having more than enough battery left over for watching a movie at the end of the day. On average I was using the SD card reader to copy around 100 images a day, Photoshop them, uploading them in Chrome, while using email, performing a large-scale news letter mail out, writing articles for the images that involved working with the images in a WYSIWYG web editor, listening to my personal music and the usual time-wasting on Facebook, even then I was getting hour after hour of faultless usage from the system, although I did often have the battery life just below half to keep a nice ballance of battery usage.

One of the few minor issues I have is that the keyboard takes a little getting used to, not hitting directly centre can sometimes lead to a missed key stroke, but while this did feel like a “problem” it’s something that stopped being an issues after 2-3 days usage, so I’m not sure if it’s a problem I learned to live with or a problem of my own typing that I adjusted to, perhaps a little of both.

The mouse pad is nice and sensitive also, I did opt to use an external mouse from time to time and the three USB ports certainly came in handy for charging other devices such as my smart phone and camera that were needed for the events.

The last thing I want to mention is the resolution, for me it was simply too low and while this isn’t a fault of the ultra book it would typically be an option I would upgrade when picking the specification. eTeknix use images that are typically confined to 800 by 800-900px and the 768 height of the screen meant I had to work with Chrome zoomed out to 75%. This is a circumstance that affects my work, but for many who are just browsing the web, using MS Office and other productivity suites, you may not have any problem, but it’s at least worth considering your chosen resolution before purchase of any system.

I do like that I can disable the LED backlight completely, effectively turning the screen black and this is handy for when your leaving something processing or rendering as it helps conserve battery life.