Asus VivoBook X200CA review

When Asus launched its first 11in VivoBook last year, it was one of the cheapest and best touchscreen laptops around. Now there’s a lot more competition to contend with, but Asus’s new VivoBook, the X200CA, proves that it’s still the king of affordable touchscreen ultra-portables. While it may be cheap, the laptop’s lightly textured surface gives it a little more character and personality than the bland plastic cases of other budget models.

It’s well made, too, as we couldn’t see any signs of flex in its chassis. Even though it’s relatively small, at just 21mm thick and weighing 1.4kg, it’s small and light enough to carry around everywhere and you don’t lose out on any ports. The X200CA comes with three USB ports, one of which is USB3, HDMI and VGA video outputs, a multi-format card reader, a fast Ethernet port and a combined headphone and microphone jack.

The X200CA is a very pleasant laptop to use day-to-day, as its bouncy keyboard was well laid out and gave plenty of feedback. The large all-in-one touchpad was also a joy to use, as Windows 8 shortcuts and multi-touch gestures such as two-finger scrolling and pinch-zooming all worked perfectly.

There’s enough space to move the cursor comfortably round the desktop as well and the lower half gave a good amount of feedback when we clicked on it to open apps and files. The only minor annoyance we encountered was how many fingerprints it picked up, which detracted from its otherwise smart design.