Asus VivoBook S400 review

Of course, one of the advantages of having slightly muted brightness levels is a longer battery life, and the S400 lasted an impressive 6 hours and 24 minutes in our light use battery tests. It’s still an hour shy of the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13, but this is still one of the better battery scores we’ve seen from an Ultrabook, giving the S400 yet another edge over its rivals.

Screen issues aside, and the S400 retains everything we liked about the S200. Its full-sized Chiclet-style keyboard showed no signs of flex while typing, and its well-spaced keys provide plenty of bounce and tactile feedback. The hard edge of the keyboard tray is perhaps a little sharp for our liking, but there’s still plenty of room to rest your hands. The smooth all-in-one touchpad is a joy to use as well, handling multi-touch gestures like pinch-zooming and two-finger scrolling with ease, and it never got in the way while we were typing either.

The S400’s 500GB hard disk gives it more storage than SSD-based Ultrabooks, but of course it’s not as quick when it comes to working on big files and it’s not silent either. On the edges are two USB2 and one USB 3 port, an SD card reader, a combined headphone and microphone jack plus full-sized VGA and HDMI ports for connecting up external displays.

The Asus VivoBook S400 doesn’t improve on the S200’s faults, then, but its bigger screen and faster processor make a better all-rounder and a great buy. It’s only other major competitor is the Core-i5 based Toshiba Satellite P845t-101, which is £70 cheaper, but even the Toshiba’s brighter screen can’t beat the S400’s vastly superior build quality, performance and portability. It wins a Best Buy award.