Asus spruced up its Vivo Book range, with the Vivo Book S and Vivo Book Pro S15, which appeal to the budget-conscious end of the market.
Our quick take
Asus Vivo Book Pro S15 p
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Asus VivoBook Pro S15
Vivo Book Pro S15
The Vivo Book Pro S15 is looking like a steal, starting at just a shade over £600. For your money, you can get a classy-looking machine with some interesting hardware. The display is up to a 4K UHD and will support the Asus Pen stylus. It comes with an option of Intel’s speedy Optane memory, which essentially means you'll get the capacity of a hard disk drive with the performance levels of an SSD. It’s the first laptop announced to use the Optane, and we’re looking forward to getting our hands on it to give it a proper work out.
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At this price level, of course, you don’t get a full aluminium body; the base is plastic, but it does feature the brushed metal lid and deck that looks very classy. It’s also pretty light at just 2.2kg, which is not at all bad for a 15.6-inch. It’s also reasonably thin at 19.2mm.
It’s powered by Intel’s H-series Kaby Lake Core i5 or i7 quad core processors, and the entry-level model comes with the Geforce GTX 1050 graphics card and up to 16GB of DDR4 RAM, which is pretty impressive given the price. Top of the range options boast up to 2TB HDD, too, or a 512GB SSD. All this is cooled down with dual fans to keep your device from overheating.
There’s a solid selection of ports, too, with a full-size SD card slot, Ethernet, three USB 3.0 ports, HDMI out, and a USB-C port. It’s lacking a Thunderbolt 3 port, but again, at the price, this is reasonable. The keyboard is backlit and seemed to be sturdy and responsive. The touchpad also has a fingerprint scanner (optional) for those who want to use Windows Hello.
Vivo Book S
Asus also announced the Vivo Book S, which is a 15.6-inch. With a starting price of just over £380, it’s not as fancy as the Pro, of course; there’s no aluminium chassis here, but it’s lighter at 1.5kg and slimmer to boot at 17.9mm. The display also has 7.8mm bezels - a feature that Asus is naming NanoEdge. It’s running on the lower-specced Intel U-series Core i-7 and can come with up to 16GB of DDR4 memory.
There are up to 2TB HDD and 512SSD. The graphics card is Nvidia’s 940MX, so it’s gaming capacity is a touch limited. Asus reckons that the Vivo Book S can charge to 60-per cent capacity in 49 minutes, but there was no word on the battery life.
The Vivo Book S promises to be a great basic laptop for general users and the Pro to offer more for creative leaning people when they come out but no release dates were given for either model.