ASUS VivoBook S400CA Pro Reviews

Great if you need a lightweight touchscreen ultraportable laptop, but a little underpowered for the money

The ASUS S400CA Touch Ultrabook seems like quite a good deal on the surface: $699 buys a touch screen, Windows 8, an attractive design and good battery life. We found it also bought a solid selection of ports, reasonable build quality and relatively good sounding speakers. What it doesn't buy is a satisfactory user experience. The touch screen works well but is more of a novelty due to the notebook form factor; there's no getting around the display wobbling when touched. The quality of the screen is abysmal; it's washed out and doesn't have enough resolution. The keyboard has a so-so feel and the chassis has a distinct rattle while typing; the touchpad also rattles. The headphone jack has background static which obviously isn't good. Lastly the performance isn't as snappy as we'd like; the hard drive offers a lot of space but just isn't fast. We'd recommend spending a bit more for a computer with a better quality display before recommending the ASUS S400CA. There's not enough substance here to allow us to give it a full recommendation.

The spec sheet features a decent level of equipment that runs Windows 8 smoothly and should provide you with the power you need. And it's a beautifully appointed laptop for the money. It looks almost like an Ultrabook as well; your friends just won't believe that it was only £500.

No matter how you feel about Windows 8, it's hard to deny that the operating system is best experienced with a touch screen. The Asus VivoBook S400CA is not only tap- and gesture-ready, but it's the most affordable touch-screen laptop we've seen to date (mid-January 2013). That's not to say the S400CA is perfect, not with its pedestrian display and poor battery life. As an overall package, however, this ultrabook packs tremendous value for those who want to get in on the Windows 8 action without breaking the bank, offering (mostly) solid ergonomics, a healthy port selection, and a fairly portable build. Congress take note: This is what compromise should look like. You can't really call the Asus VivoBook S400CA exciting, but you can call it thoroughly capable.

The Asus VivoBook S400CA-UH51 is one of the least expensive ways to get a fully functional Windows 8 ultrabook. It's a touch-screen ultrabook that gets the pricing and feature set right.

As we well know, Windows 8 is meant to take advantage of the touch-screen interface, and subsequent Windows 8 optimized apps follows that functionality. Many traditional (read: non-touch) laptops and ultrabooks have to put in workarounds in order to be able to navigate through Windows 8 without the benefit of a touch screen. The Asus VivoBook S400CA-UH51 is one of the first to successfully marry a touch screen (for Windows 8) and ultrabook components. It's one of the first laptops to feature both full Windows 8 compatibility and a decent price, just under $700. For that it earns our Editors' Choice for entry-level ultrabooks with touch-screens.

The Asus VivoBook S400CA may have a new name, but it's a very familiar laptop, infusing some of the Zenbook design into a 14-inch Windows 8 laptop with a touch screen. It's aggressively priced at $700, and covers all the bases you might be looking for in the average laptop, but lacks a killer feature, or a particularly killer price, considering the new bottom line in Windows touch laptops extends as low as $500. Even though it's relatively well-designed, you can sense the corners that were cut; and it's easy to imagine other laptops leapfrogging it in 2013 sooner than later. But for now, it's a fair value.