The new £699 (inc. VAT)/$699.99 Asus VivoBook S 14 is a solidly crafted 14-inch Home windows ten laptop managing on a 10th era Intel Core processor. And if you’re looking for one thing a bit extra hanging than common, it truly is out there with a inexperienced or pink lid in addition to black and white. That stated, I could only obtain it on the net in the British isles with the similar black lid I was despatched for overview.
The metal chassis delivers good security for the innards. I was capable to bow the lid in my fingers a tiny, but in general this is a long lasting machine. You can have to have 1.4kg (3.08lbs) all around in your backpack or bag, though, and this laptop will occupy a area 32.49cm broad by 21.35cm deep by 1.59cm thick (twelve.79in. x eight.4in. x .62in.). The base has ‘diamond cut’ edges to the upper of 3 sides, which even when the lid is shut provides visual fascination.
The 14-inch Asus VivoBook S14 S433FA runs on 10th-era Core i5 or i7 processors with up to 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB of SSD storage. Lid colours are out there in white, pink, inexperienced and black.
Photographs: Asus
In situation you can’t obtain the Enter key, it truly is prominently highlighted.
Image: Sandra Vogel/ZDNet
When you open the lid the eye is drawn to the Enter key, which has been supplied a marker-pen yellow encompass. It really does glance odd. The keyboard alone is comfy to use, and personal keys are significant and springy. On the other hand, there’s a good deal of flex — sufficient for even a light-weight-fingered typist like me to discover. This is really the only establish concern of notice, and it truly is a bit of a disappointment.
Faucet the icon in the top rated proper of the touchpad, and an embedded calculator appears.
Image: Sandra Vogel/ZDNet
The trackpad has a really great truly feel to it, and is responsive. Asus delivers next screens in the touchpad on some of its ZenBook laptops (the ZenBook Flip 15 UX563FD and ZenBook 14 UX434FL for instance), but the trickery is extra muted in the VivoBook vary. There is a little icon in the top rated proper corner of the touchpad that, when tapped, brings up an embedded calculator that will allow you to do some primary maths. I instead like this thought — it truly is economical, straightforward, and doesn’t seem more than-specified. If my laptop had this feature I am guaranteed I’d use it. There is an choice with no calculator and a fingerprint reader top rated proper of the touchpad instead.
The 14-inch display screen is what Asus calls ‘frameless NanoEdge’, although in fact there’s a bit extra bezel right here than on some other designs, and ‘frameless’ is a bit of a extend. Asus doesn’t give us bezel proportions but I measured the limited edge bezels at 7mm and the top rated edge at 11mm (lots of area for the webcam, although it does absence a sliding privacy deal with). The recess of the display screen would make it glance a tiny outdated-fashioned, and it truly is not touch delicate. Still, it has wonderful viewing angles, is fairly vibrant, and the matte complete will attractiveness to these who never like staring at their have reflection.
The Intel Core i5-10210U processor in the £699/$699 iteration of this laptop has 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. You also get a twelve-thirty day period subscription to Microsoft 365 Private and 1TB of cloud storage. There is also a Core i7-10510U variant, and options for up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of on-board storage, but none of these are out there in the British isles.
There are lots of ports and connectors on board. On the proper edge are two USB two. ports and a MicroSD card slot, when the remaining edge houses the spherical-pin electrical power jack, a complete-dimension HDMI port, a USB 3.two port and a USB-C port as properly as a 3.5mm audio jack. It is great to see Wi-Fi 6 rounding out the connectivity choices.
SEE: Microsoft 365: A cheat sheet (absolutely free PDF)
Battery life is fairly good. I used one four-hour session producing into a website application when streaming tunes about half the time and performing some website searching, during which time the battery went from a hundred per cent to 55 per cent. All-day battery life might be achievable with similarly undemanding workloads.
The Asus VivoBook S14 S443FA is a long lasting and economical Home windows ten Professional laptop with a nifty feature in the touchpad-embedded calculator. All-day battery life is one more in addition point, but beware the flexy keyboard.
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