ASUS VivoBook S200E Pro Reviews

Our only real complaint about the S200E is the annoyingly reflective screen. Performance and battery life are respectable rather than outstanding, but the S200E offers an attractive, lightweight design and build quality that are rarely seen in laptops costing less than £500.

Even without the touchscreen, the small, solid, cheap and light Asus VivoBook S200 would make a case for itself. Yet put the strokeable screen into the equation and it comes together nicely as an attractive little package.

The Asus VivoBook S200E looks very promising at first: a surprisingly upscale chassis, a decent port selection, and very good input devices - we wouldn't have expected that from a notebook costing 550 Euro (~$710). One of the interesting aspects of the S200E is the precise touchscreen, which is a very differentiation feature. How usable the screen is a different question: even though Windows 8 is optimized for touch inputs, we think that the traditional mouse and keyboard allow for higher productivity. Maybe a matte and brighter panel or a larger battery would have been a better choice than the touch screen. While the above point might be a matter of personal preference, there is no question that the cooling capabilities of the VivoBooks are not even remotely adequate. Although the system features a ULV CPU, even regular applications cause throttling, which can have quite an impact on performance in certain usage scenarios. When both the CPU and the graphics card are heavily used (gaming), the performance decrease to way below 50 percent. We hope that Asus is able to address this issue via a BIOS update. At the moment, we can only recommend the VivoBook for those users who really like the touch screen feature and don't plan on running any demanding (3D) applications.

It's a shame the screen is a bit dim, but this is still a great-value touchscreen Windows 8 laptop

The Asus VivoBook S200 is a brilliant little laptop which offers supreme good looks, slick performance and excellent portability, and all for a highly agreeable price.

A delectable 11.6in touchscreen Windows 8 laptop at an unbelievably low price