Although they were initially announced all the way back at Computex, ASUS held a casual event in NYC this past Wednesday (Oct. 5) to officially launch an array of new products, including the ZenBook 3, ZenWatch 3, ZenPhone 3, and Transformer Pro 3 and Mini. We?ve got some initial coverage of all of those products here at HotHardware if you?d like some additional background on the full line-up, including hands-on video of the latest ZenBook and smartwatch. However, we couldn't wait to dive in a little deeper with the ZenBook 3 for a couple of reasons. First off, the ZenBook 3 is the first Ultrabook to hit the lab built around Intel's brand-new Kaby Lake-based 7th Generation Core series processors. If you?re unfamiliar with Kaby Lake, it is the follow-up product to last year's Skylake, and features improved responsiveness, a beefed up multimedia engine, and it's built with a refined 14nm process that improves clocks and overall power efficiency.

The ASUS ZenBook 3 also happens to be one of the thinnest and lightest Ultrabooks to hit the market, but despite its diminutive form factor, it is packing some sought after amenities like a NVMe PCIe SSD, 802.11ac 2x2 MIMO Wi-Fi, a backlit keyboard, and Windows Hello-compatible fingerprint reader -- at least on the Core i7-based model...