Asus VivoBook X200: Touchscreen laptop for less than 400 euros

Cons

• Cooling warms wrist rest
• Short battery life
• Build quality

For less than 400 euros, Asus can deliver the Vivobook X200: an 11.6″ laptop with Windows 8, 500GB of disk space, a touchscreen and all the connections that you also find on more expensive laptops. For that money, can you also have expectations about the speed, screen and battery life?

Appearance, keyboard, touchpad

The VivoBook X200 is a small, light laptop, reminiscent of the popular Eee PC netbooks that Asus sold a lot in the past. Instead of smooth, shiny plastic, the X200 opted to use matte plastic with a slightly ribbed pattern. That gives the laptop a more mature look than the netbooks of yesteryear. The finish then detracts from that appearance; the seams between two parts of the housing are clearly visible and the top edge of the screen is downright sharp.

The compact size of the laptop also results in a keyboard that is smaller than what you are used to from the average laptop. The keys are flat and provide sufficient feedback in themselves, but that is negated by the fact that the housing springs with the tapping of the keyboard. Even if you don’t use much force while typing, the housing moves along. This is clearly a point where this laptop has been cut.

It is striking that the touchpad feels a lot firmer than the keyboard. The touchpad accurately follows your finger and the housing of the X200 does not bounce when you click on the mouse keys. The buttons of the touchpad unfortunately feel a bit cheap; the feedback is unclear and the entire touchpad clearly moves along when pressing a button.

Screen, battery life and speed

The VivoBook X200 is one of the cheapest laptops in the Pricewatch that are equipped with a touchscreen, which automatically entails a glossy screen. The panel is not laminated and that leads to a nice dose of reflections on the screen. Frustratingly, there’s not much you can do about that, because the screen’s backlight gives up at a maximum brightness of 202cd/m². In practice, it always seems as if the screen is dimmed, even when the screen lighting is set to maximum.

Despite its compact size, we wouldn’t take the X200 with us anytime soon. Anyone who uses the laptop to surf the internet will be able to work for less than three hours on a battery charge, while in our video test another half hour was taken off. That is disappointing, especially since Asus has proven to be able to achieve a battery life of more than ten hours with the latest generations of Eee PC netbooks.

The speed of the Celeron processor is enough to run Windows 8 and use the laptop for simple things like web browsing and emailing. Our tests show the speed of the X200 to be slightly above that of most Windows tablets. In addition, more heat is developed than with a tablet and this is very noticeable due to the awkward position of the cooling. Because the warm air is blown out under the left palm rest, that side of the laptop heats up, which can become uncomfortable, especially during intensive use.

Conclusion

Anyone looking for a cheap laptop with a touchscreen will soon find the Vivobook X200 from Asus. Judging by the specifications of the laptop, you get a lot for your money. In addition to 500GB of storage and a touchscreen, you get three USB connections, HDMI, D-sub, a regular Ethernet connection and an SD card reader. The Celeron processor isn’t the fastest, but you shouldn’t expect much for an 11.6-inch laptop of this money. So not a bad laptop on paper, but there are a number of setbacks during use. The mediocre finish leads to sharp edges to the laptop, while the housing springs very deeply during tapping.In addition, the screen reflects quite a bit and that cannot be compensated by increasing the brightness.

We found the most striking design flaw to be the exhaust of the cooling, which warms up your left palm. The battery life of no more than three hours is also not very successful for us. So we prefer to keep saving or look at a convertible laptop such as the Asus Transformer T100 in this price range. This means you sacrifice storage and processing power, but you work much more pleasantly, thanks to a better screen and a battery that easily lasts a working day.