Asus X102BA review

Cheap laptops are nothing new, but few have 10-point touchscreens and come with the full version of Office 2013 Home and Student. Even the award-winning Asus Transformer T100 is £350, but although the Asus X102BA has price on its side, it faces some incredibly stiff competition from the rest of its cut-price touchscreen rivals.

The touchscreen itself was reasonably responsive. We were able to perform Windows 8 and multitouch gestures pretty easily. The X102BA’s 1,366×768 resolution looked sharp as well on the 10.1in display despite the screen’s somewhat grainy coating. Sadly, though, the display’s image quality wasn’t great.

Our colour calibrator showed it was displaying just 60.4 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut, which is fairly typical for a budget laptop, but blue and cyan coverage was much stronger than any other colour. This meant colours looked washed out overall. Black levels were also high, which made them appear almost grey depending how we angled the screen.

The laptop’s contrast levels were equally lacking, and we measured a contrast ratio of just 314:1. This isn’t the worst contrast ratio we’ve ever measured on a laptop at this price, but the screen’s narrow viewing angles made it difficult to see any kind of detail in our high contrast test images unless we tilted the screen forward. The screen’s reflective glossy finish didn’t help, either, especially in our brightly lit office.

The X102BA’s keys gave a decent amount of tactile feedback, but our hands felt cramped while typing due to the keyboard’s tiny layout, and we were constantly hitting the wrong keys when trying to type at speed. We also had to be fairly heavy-handed with the tiny touchpad for it to work correctly. We’d recommend using the touchscreen as often as possible, as we found Windows 8 gestures difficult to perform on the touchpad.

If this wasn’t irritating enough, the X102BA’s underlying hardware contains some of the slowest components we’ve ever tested. The X102BA uses a 1GHz AMD A4-1200 processor and has 4GB of RAM. Other processors in AMD’s A4 series have always been a bit sluggish, but the A4-1200-based X102BA scored a pitifully low 7 overall in our multimedia benchmarks, making the X102BA the slowest laptop we’ve ever tested. This means it’ll struggle with even the most basic tasks.

To the X102BA’s credit, we could browse the web, write MS Word documents and watch Full HD video files pretty well, but the X102BA was noticeably slower to load applications than any other laptop we’ve recently tested. Using the AppStarter program, it took the X102BA an average of 2.5 seconds to load LibreOffice, and around 21 seconds to load simple apps such as Fresh Paint. It even took the X102BA 17 seconds to open Chrome and load our home page. The X102BA struggled to play 720p YouTube videos smoothly, and videos appeared jerky and jagged even when the video was fully loaded.

Needless to say, the only games you’ll be playing on the X102BA will be simple Flash games, as its AMD Radeon HD 8180 integrated graphics chip isn’t cut out for 3D graphics. Even 2D games such as Bastion proved a struggle. We couldn’t play the Chrome version of Bastion in our web browser smoothly either, and most Chromebooks can do this comfortably.

This makes the X102BA debilitating compared to other cut-price laptops such as the Acer C720 Chromebook. This is a shame because its battery life is fairly good for a small laptop. The X102BA lasted 6 hours and 28 minutes in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness, which is roughly two hours more than many other budget laptops we’ve tested.

The laptop’s chunky chassis also provides a lot of room for a good range of ports. There are three USB ports, one of which is USB3, and there are HDMI and VGA video outputs for connecting the laptop to an external display. You also get conveniences such as a Fast Ethernet port, an SD card reader and a combined headphone and microphone jack. It also has a fairly large 500GB hard disk, which is enough storage for a decent media library.

The Asus X102BA is certainly very cheap, but you shouldn’t buy this laptop when the superior Asus Transformer Book T100 is just £60 more. With its slow processor, long loading times and poor screen, the X102BA is both frustrating and time-consuming to use. If you really want a cheap touchscreen laptop, the Asus Transformer Book T100 is a much better buy. Otherwise you’re better off with a £200 Chromebook such as the Acer C720.