I have a Macbook Air and it's great - light weight and fairly durable.  They just came out with a new one that sounds even better but I haven't seen it yet.  Don't know anything about the Zenbook.

I used on my last photo trip a galaxy tab 10.1 with the usb adapter and few  cards I managed to transfer about 30Gb by connecting my camera to the tablet. Of course no postprocessing but I could look at the raw files...

The rumours are they're updating the Mac Pro line in the very near future. Top spec pro machine in an Mac Air case. The new Intel chips ship in April, Apple are typically first in line. I'll be upgrading for sure went Mac in 2007 and never looked back.

Asus is a good brand. Build motherboards, graphic cards in a lot of new computers for many people over the years and never seen any hardware problems. Also the Asus notebooks I �ve seen seem to do their job well. They also give two years of guarantee on notebooks instead of one, as most of the others do and they are not very expensive when making a comparison of the specs to same type of notebooks with other brands . This is based on my own experience, I have no statistic info. Also prices may differ in other parts of the world, don�t know...

Also a point to think of: all harddisks has become very expensive lately thanks to the floods in Thailand. I suppose this will be temporary. An option is perhaps to buy a notebook with a smaller harddisk and replace it in the future with a bigger one. You need to have a backup of your OS at that time to replace everything as this info is on the old harddisk in a separate partition.

Can�t tell you anything about the screen quality of the notebooks and if they can easily be callibrated. That is an important thing for photographers when you want to use it for working on your photos cq illustrations.
 

Is "Notebook" being used here to define something similar to an iPad or Kindle Fire ... or is it more similar to Laptop?

Didn't know Asus had anything similar to iPad?

Confusing isn't it?

Notebooks: are bigger, usually what you thing of as a portable computer, probably has a DVD drive, hard drive and fairly substantial. 2-3 hour battery life, 14,15,17 screens, real hard drives, CD/DVD.

Netbooks: Smaller, maybe reduced keyboard, 95% some are even smaller. Often have no CD/DVD, solid state Electronic hard drive. 7 hours on battery on a good day. 10" is common.

UltraBooks: (what these are in the thread) Ultra slim, ultra light, ultra new and expensive, full keyboard.  5 hours battery life, Solid State Hard Drive - double the price of a Netbook or Notebook, more computing power just because they are the latest.

Hope that helps explain it a little better?

Personally, if I was traveling light, I'd still go with a Netbook. (carry an external backup drive for photos) But as I've admitted before "I'm Cheap". When it comes down to a $400 loaded netbook, or a $1100 bare bones Ultrabook, I don't see that much of an advantage in spending $700 more for a flashy case and slightly bigger screen. I have $2 reading glasses.

Mac: price and I have no software, so add another couple thousand for editing and utilities, I'd buy a MacBook because of the image quality. I don't have $3000-$4000 laying around, so I stick with PCs.

What you asked about may be palm size, tablets, attache size, and i-stuff. 3-7" screen, although there are some 10"? Most don't even have a keyboard option, touch screen. Most don't run standard computer software. Nothing like the above "books" at all. I think Asus makes a netbook that folds over and becomes a tablet. That's kind of interesting. Kindles are horrid for web surfing, great for reading. I have a Kindle Fire, it's "cute" and novel, but from my viewpoint, very uncomfortable for web use.

I got an HP netbook before my last trip.
Fine for browsing, slow but bearable (faster than the Epson thingy I had before) for looking through photos (5D2 RAWs), almost full sized keyboard. The small screen makes it difficult to do any editing, but I was really just thinking to use it to store images, to delete the duds and 'seconds' and to add keywords. Upgraded to 2Gb ram, of course.