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.

The real star of the X200CA is the 11.6in touchscreen. Its ten-point touch support was incredibly smooth and responsive and its 1,366×768 resolution looked sharp on its small display. With Windows 8.1’s limitations having an accurate and quick touchscreen is a real bonus and made the operating system enjoyable to use.

The screen isn’t particularly bright, which was one of our main complaints on the previous model, but it’s perfectly adequate for everyday use. It is worth remembering that this is a budget laptop and some compromises are inevitable, especially when it comes to screen quality.

Image quality was average, but this is expected given the X200CA’s budget price. Our colour calibrator showed it was displaying 53.6 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut, which is a little below what we’d normally expect to see on a laptop of this price, but colours still looked good in our solid image tests. The screen’s glossy finish helped give our reds, greens and blues some much-needed depth and vibrancy, and whites looked clear and uniform across the screen.

Blacks were a little grey, which reflected our high black level reading of 0.54cd/m2, but it was the laptop’s low contrast levels that proved most problematic when we were looking at our set of test photos. We measured a contrast ratio of just 363:1, which made it difficult to see areas of dark shadow detail in our high contrast test images. The screen’s narrow viewing angles didn’t help either, as there was only a very limited window where photos looked good before the screen darkened and obscured its detail completely.

This isn’t too unusual on a budget laptop, and its quick components more than made up for any deficiency in the laptop’s screen. It’s no powerhouse, but our review model’s 1.4GHz Intel Celeron 1007U processor and 4GB of RAM scored 19 in our multimedia benchmarks. This is fine for use in everyday tasks, such as web browsing and word processing.

Unsurprisingly, the X200CA’s Intel HD Graphics chip isn’t powerful enough to handle the latest 3D games, as it failed our Dirt Showdown test. Simple titles from the Windows 8 Store should work fine, though, as we were able to run Zen Pinball FX2 smoothly with no problem at all.

The most disappointing part of the X200CA was its short battery life. Even with its low screen brightness, it lasted just 3 hours and 52 minutes in our light use test, which is quite poor even for a budget laptop. Last year’s VivoBook lasted nearly five and a half hours by comparison, so it’s likely you’ll need to take the X200CA’s charger with you if you plan on using it on the move.

It’s a shame the laptop doesn’t last a little longer, but the Asus VivoBook X200CA is still a great value budget laptop. Decent Windows 8 laptops are hard to come by and its responsive touchscreen and touchpad made it easy to use. It might sound trivial but so many Windows 8 laptops are ruined by terrible touchpads and keyboards.

Getting the fundamentals right is one thing, but the X200CA is also a very speedy little laptop. Unfortunately battery life stops it from being a truly exceptional laptop, but if you’re unlikely to be away from a power socket for too long this need not be an issue. If you’re looking for a device that gets the best out of Windows 8.1 then you won’t go far wrong here. It wins a Budget Buy award.