A striking design and novel ScreenPad mean the Asus VivoBook S15 is more interesting than your average Windows 10 laptop, but the middling display can't compete with similarly priced laptop rivals
Key Specifications
Review Price: | Rs. 49,990 |
Display: | 15.6in Full HD LCD Screen |
Variant: | 8 GB RAM / 512 GB SSD |
Status: | Type-C USB 3.1, Type-A USB 3.1. 2 x Type-A USB 2.0, HDMI 1.4, microSD Card Slot |
Pros
Asus has served up a compelling package, blending sharp design, a generous helping of ports and a secondary screen that doubles up as a trackpad.
Prices start at £ 800 for the Vivobook S15 range, the upper end of the "cheap" one. The model being reviewed is the S532FL, which costs £900 and features a current-gen processor in the Intel Core i7-8565U, 8GB of RAM, plus a 512GB SSD.
If your budget is just short of a grand and you want to know what you can get for your cash, read on.
No longer the preserve of ZenBooks, Asus’s ScreenPad technology is now present on cheaper VivoBook laptops.
Asus Vivobook S15 Design - Minor and Silver, with a secondary screen (pad)Prices start at £ 800 for the Vivobook S15 range, the upper end of the "cheap" one. The model being reviewed is the S532FL, which costs £900 and features a current-gen processor in the Intel Core i7-8565U, 8GB of RAM, plus a 512GB SSD.
If your budget is just short of a grand and you want to know what you can get for your cash, read on.
No longer the preserve of ZenBooks, Asus’s ScreenPad technology is now present on cheaper VivoBook laptops.
The Asus VivoBook S15 laptops are available in a number of metallic color options, including muted gold, shiny cyan, as well as silver models with red and yellow trim. However, our review unit was different to the standard All-Silver.
That’s not to say it’s unattractive – on the contrary, the matte finish, clean lines and gently recessed keyboard area are all rather appealing.
In addition, and in keeping with the ZenBook range from last year, Asus has brought its “ErgoLift” design game to the VivoBook laptops. This is a little design quirk that sees the deck of the laptop lifted off the desk’s surface. Not only does this serve to angle the keys towards your hands, making for a slightly nicer typing experience, it also ensures warm air can escape from the cooling vent more easily.
ErgoLift is a feature that’s becoming more common in all Windows laptops, not only Asus units. The HP Envy 13 employs a similar trick, too. Nevertheless, it’s nice to see it appearing in the VivoBook range all the same.
The Asus VivoBook S15 measures 18 x 361 x 243mm and weighs 1.8kg. As such, it’s slim enough to pop into a satchel or rucksack, and it isn’t going to be a drag to lug around all day. Then again, the lightweight LG Gram 15 weighs just 1.1kg and the even bigger LG Gram 17 weighs 1.3kg, so it’s not the lightest laptop out there.
Slim bezels (5.2mm on the sides, 6.5mm on the top) give the VivoBook S15 an extra degree of style, and draw attention to the 15.6-inch Full HD display.
The laptop is more than adequately furnished with ports. As well as two old-school Type-A USB 2.0, there are faster USB 3.1 ports (one Type-A, the other Type-C), a microSD card slot, and an HDMI port. Transferring photos and files to and from your phone or digital camera, either via memory card or directly from the device, will be a breeze regardless of the device you’re using.
If we had to quibble, we’d say that an Ethernet port – or Thunderbolt 3 on the USB-C port – would have been welcome, for situations where you’d want a fast and dedicated wired connection.
There’s also a handwriting recognition app called simply Handwriting. I was happy to see this working well, with the app accurately detecting poorly scribbled words. You can even download extra language packs (it detected long Russian words too), which may come in use for language students or those learning another language in their spare time.
In the future, it would be great if Asus ScreenPads would let you write with a stylus, because writing words with your fingers feels unnatural. It’s less accurate than writing with a pen, which is arguably more conducive to picking up another language.
Along with the first-party apps, there’s Evernote and Spotify – which, at the time of writing, don’t really leverage the ScreenPad in a clever or practical way. You can simply launch the Windows versions of those apps in the small screen. What would have been better is if, say, the ScreenPad could give you a quick look at what’s stored in your Clipboard, or you could control Spotify in the way you can via Spotify Connect.
This ScreenPad also features Asus’s new ScreenPad 2.0 tech. The new 2019 ScreenPads are bigger than previous-gen units, they’re less battery-hungry, and feature a better user interface, which includes the ability to toggle the ScreenPad for times when you just want to use it as a bog-standard trackpad.
The Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 colour spaces are wider than sRGB – they contain more colours – and are of interest to digital photographers and videographers. Seeing as the VivoBook S15 isn’t a laptop designed for heavy photo or video work (you’d want a device covering 70% of either, at the very least), low coverage in these areas isn’t such a big deal.
You could argue these scores are typical of laptops in this price range; colour space coverage of the Acer Nitro 5 and HP Pavilion 15 are in the same ballpark. That said, the HP Envy 13 range, which starts at just £100 more, boasts much higher-quality displays and proves laptops under the £1000 mark don’t have to compromise on displays.
As with Geekbench 4, Geekbench 5 provides single and multi-core scores to give you an idea of how well a laptop will perform at single-threaded tasks (such as gaming) and more complex, multi-threaded applications such as video editing or 3D modelling, or PC multi-tasking in general.
A Geekbench 5 score of 1000 is considered the baseline, so the VivoBook S15’s single-core and multi-core scores of 926 and 2723 are interesting, suggesting this laptop is just about good enough for today’s PC tasks.
To get a sense of how well the Asus VivoBook S15 would handle games, I ran the 3DMark: Ice Storm benchmark. This stress-tests a system’s GPU; while the VivoBook S15 doesn’t have a dedicated graphics processor, the CPU features integrated Intel UHD Graphics 620.
The less-demanding Ice Storm test gave a score of 66,405, which is similar to what we’ve seen with other Whiskey Lake-based laptops such as the Lenovo ThinkPad T490s and the HP Pavilion 15.
Realistically, you’re unlikely to be able to squeeze out a game of Fortnite or Apex Legends on the VivoBook S15. My attempt at Apex Legends wasn’t wholly successful: using Origin’s in-game frame-rate counter, I found that even with all the textures and graphics dialled all the way down, the game would limp along at 10-20fps.
Finally, I ran PCMark 10, a holistic benchmark that simulates a range of PC tasks. A PCMark 10 score of 4000 indicates a system is suitable for basic PC work, and the Asus VivoBook S15 landed just wide of the mark here with a score of 3953.
Should I buy the Asus VivoBook S15?Asus VivoBook S15 is a precise and beautiful looking Windows 10 laptop with a 15.5in original display and very attractive selling points.
I’m a huge fan of the ScreenPad, and feel the multi-lingual Handwriting app could prove super-useful for language students. However, third-party app support is still lacking, and until this improves, the ScreenPad remains a nice-to-have feature rather than an essential one.
The fact the display can’t show you a wide range of colours is a drawback too, but only if you want to edit photos on your laptop. For most buyers, it will suffice.
The Asus VivoBook S15 is fine for basic PC work, but it can’t do much more than that. For many in the market for a sub-£1000 laptop, that will be enough, but for those who want a device that can cope with some light gaming on the side though, this device falls short.
Judgment
The Asus VivoBook S15 is a well-built machine and a more impressive laptop under the $ 1000 mark. If you’re really digging that ScreenPad feature, allowing for more efficient multitasking, then thyis will no doubt be a great buy.
The biggest problem with the Asus VivoBook S15 though, is you can find better value alternatives around the same price. The HP Envy 13, for example, features a Nvidia GeForce MX250 dedicated graphics card and a superior display, and so remains our top recommended sub-£1000 laptop.
Unlike other sites, we never charge for a product review. Say what you think - send your emails to me.
0 Comments