 The Razer Blade 14 2015. It's really not that different from the two previous iterations, both of which I described as engineering marvels, and one of which won an Editor's Choice Award. So, when I got too many requests to ignore to review this thing, I said to myself, okay, well if I'm gonna cover the same product again for the third time, I'm gonna do a couple of things. Number one is I'm asking Razer for a Keeper Unit this time, and number two, I'm gonna throw the toughest test I can at it, one that the Surface Pro 3, a very widely respected device, failed miserably. I'm gonna leave my XPS 12 behind for a three-week trip to Southeast Asia and bring only the new Blade to see if it's as suitable as an ultra-portable gaming rig slash workstation as my previous test drives would indicate that it would be, or if it'll end up grinding my gears until I'm forced to just stop using it since it's my only choice for a computer. Intel's new 750 series SSDs utilize the NVMe standard, providing speeds never before seen on consumer storage drives. Click this laptop or here to learn more. So I worked on the general overview for this review in Singapore, which I would describe as Asia with training wheels for Americans. It's hot and humid, there's a lot of Asian people there, and the availability of burgers and fries is pretty limited compared to chicken rice, but all the signs are in English and most of the toilets I encountered had seats. Anyway, just like its predecessors, the Blade 14 2015 features a hyper-thin aluminum unibody design with only a dual fan intake, hinge exhaust, cooling solution, and a couple of long rubber feet adorning the bottom, a simple illuminated Razer logo on the top, and otherwise a very clean and beautiful design that is without completely forgetting functionality. So while the unit is thinner than a dime, as Razer loves to say, it's still got three USB 3.0 ports and an HDMI 1.4 output to go along with a headphone slash microphone jack, power plug, and lock on the sides, front-facing speakers, and Razer's trademark solid and satisfying chiclet-style keyboard complete with weird typeface and unnecessary 20 levels of green backlight adjustment. Some of the stuff about it is not unnecessary though. The Wi-Fi coverage was so spotty in the house where we were staying in Singapore that I ended up upgrading their access point, but the good news is the Blade dropped fewer connections than my other mobile devices from the start, and while the screen could take some pointers from Apple to be usable in the car, since higher brightness is required to compensate for the bouncing types of reflections caused by vehicle movement, it was definitely suitable for stationary use outdoors near the famous Simlim Square Tech Mall and while lounging in the yard with the parrot who lives there. But it's time to move on to my next part of this video as well as my next destination, Brunei, where thanks to some lazier days when my son got sick, I spent most of my computer time replying to emails or watching movies, the latter of which led to a couple more observations about the Blade. On the subject of the screen, I'm still really not sure how I feel about the 3200x1800 resolution. It's harder to drive natively than a theoretical 2560x1440 panel would be, and requires very aggressive scaling to be usable for most people. Razer actually sets it to 250% out of the box. But viewing angles, motion blur, colors, and of course smoothness of on-screen elements without anti-aliasing are all solid selling points and made watching videos on the device really enjoyable. But that didn't impress me nearly as much as the time I pulled the HDMI cable out of our host's satellite box and plugged it into the Blade so everyone could watch Penguins of Madagascar. And it took me until halfway through the movie to realize the TV didn't support audio over HDMI, and we were actually listening to the laptop speakers the entire time. A fact that made me happy then, but continues to infuriate me actually. It turns out Razer does know a thing or two about audio product engineering, which makes it that much more tragic that they insist on their gaming tuned headphones and headsets when it's obvious that they can do better. But I guess this is doomed to remain a philosophical agree to disagree point, and since Razer is MinTan's company and not mine, I guess they'll keep doing it his way until I enter an agreement with them to do a limited like Linus edition run of Kraken forged headphones that actually sound good or something. Actually, that'd be kind of badass. Men, if you're watching, we should do that. Another thing I noticed in Brunei, since it was the only time on my trip where I used the Blade fairly extensively without a wall plug, I ended up waiting around an hour during a lady's trip to the salon and did a fair bit of writing in the car, is that this aspect of the device has improved a lot to the point where while on the original Blade 14, battery life was good considering the other positive points of the product, now I'd actually call it a fairly strong point. I was able to work in airplane mode for anywhere from four to up to almost six hours in a light productivity setting. Definitely something that pleases me. Gaming, well, you're still going to be looking at a little over that, you know, hour mark unless you're using some pretty aggressive Nvidia battery saving features like capping your FPS at 30 or something along those lines. The good news about which is that thanks to its 970 GPU, it does support that feature, but I still consider it mostly a mobile workstation and you're going to want to plug in if you want to do any kind of extremely long gaming session. In Malaysia, our next stop, our host had one of those 4G mobile hotspot internet plans, so I was able to use the Blade to get racket advice with my helper at the mall. Then I was able to use it again and oh wait, no I didn't. Our host's 4G data cap got wrecked by having six house guests, so even though my brother-in-law was giving me crap about why are you pulling out your laptop in the, you know, upside down house and this cool castle slash church thing in Malacca where there's no wi-fi, I persisted and at the very least I got, I hope, some neato shots of it sitting on the stone walls of the church and wow, I sure wish Brandon had been there because with his knack for b-roll I'm sure that these shots would have been better, but he's just plain too expensive to take with me on a trip like this, so whatever. The last stop in my vacation was Thailand and while my plan was to finally find some time to game on the bloody things since I finally had decent or at least consistent internet without giving too much detail, Traveler's Diarrhea totally sucks and I spent most of my mere two days in Phuket in bed sleeping off the wicked headache that came along with it. So I guess all that's left is the conclusion about this notebook again. There are some small things that definitely became bigger to me now that I'm using it as a daily driver versus when I was just using review units. I'd like a wider opening hinge, full-sized up and down arrow keys, seriously please fix this, a larger track pad with larger buttons that go to the edge of the laptop so that I can just kind of casually lean against the bottom of the laptop rather than like really intentionally pressing it when I'm using it two-handed and while I'm dreaming how about a um I don't know slightly more fingerprint resistant finish. But that's about it. They fixed the crummy ram capacity of the last gen and they beefed up the graphics, what's not to love. It's powerful enough that I can do any kind of work or gaming I could want while on the go. It's portable enough to be practical, something I value a lot as someone who used to carry a thick gaming notebook everywhere and honestly if you're into that kind of thing it gets a lot of compliments. People were we were staying with security checkpoint officers you name it people kept asking me what that cool laptop was. Too bad their jaws all probably collectively hit the floor when they looked it up later and saw how much it costs. But that's the price you've always had to pay to be on the bleeding edge and in the case of the blade 14 I know at least some of you will decide it's worth it even if it has no LAN port and I have to carry a dongle with me all over the place. But I guess it's not like I can travel without a certain number of extra essentials. Anyway like the great bathroom supplies from the guys at DollarShaveClub.com for a few bucks a month you can get high quality razors straight to your door so you always look good and okay I'm not going to focus on the razors in this spot today too much because One Wipe Charlies need a spotlight here. I'm gonna confess I left for my trip to Asia without some of the travel packs of One Wipe Charlies which was a huge and brown mistake. There's no toilet paper at all in public bathrooms in some of Southeast Asian countries with the expectation being that you'll shoot water from a hose at your butt and hope you don't manage to make some kind of a mess. A pack or two of One Wipe Charlies would have been way better. Anyway that's DollarShaveClub.com slash Linus join the club now. Shave time and shave money and shave your butt. I guess or yeah the whole save sounds like shave thing doesn't really work as well in that instance or maybe it does. Anyway guys thanks for watching. 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