Asus has been offering affordable portable notebooks for a while. The company practically invented the netbook by introducing the first Eee PC mini-laptop in 2007.
Now that netbooks are out of fashion, Asus is taking a few different approaches to the affordable portable space. Asus is one of the biggest players in the Android tablet space. The company recently introduced a line of Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets. And then there's the VivoBook line of notebooks.
The Asus VivBook X202E is an 11.6 inch, 3 pound notebook that sells for as little as $499. It's not quite thin enough to be called an ultrabook — and it doesn't have a solid state disk, which is another ultrabook requirement. But with an Intel Core i3 Ivy Bridge processor it's a pretty zippy little notebook.
It also has a built-in touchscreen display, which comes in handy when using the new touch-friendly Windows 8 user interface. The X202E also happens to be one of the cheapest touchscreen notebooks on the market.
That's a bit of a mixed blessing. The screen has an unusually large bezel… and wobbles a bit when you touch it. If Asus skimped on anything else, it might have been the battery. The notebook gets lackluster battery life, and the battery isn't user replaceable.
Still, if you're looking for an inexpensive (and portable) Windows 8 notebook with a touchscreen, the Asus VivoBook X202E may be one of the best options around.
Overview
Asus loaned me a VivoBook X202E for the purposes of this review. It features an 11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel touchscreen display, an Intel Core i3-3217U Ivy Bridge processor, Intel HD 4000 graphics, 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive which, for some reason, is divided into two 250GB partitions.
The notebook features 802.11b/g/n WiFi, 10/100 Ethernet, Bluetooth 4.0, an SDHC card slot, 2 USB 2.0 ports, and 1 USB 3.0 port. There's a front-facing VGA camera, a headset jack, and VGA and HDMI ports.
The VivoBook X202E measures 11.9″ x 7.9″ x 0.9″ and weighs about 2.9 pounds. It has a 38Whr battery, which Asus says should last for about 4 hours, which is about what I managed to eke out in my tests — although you'll probably run down the battery more quickly by watching videos or playing 3D games.
Asus ships the laptop with Windows 8 64-bit, and you can use the touchpad, touchscreen or an external pointing device to navigate the Windows 8 user interface.
Design
While the Asus VivoBook X202E has some premium features such as a touchscreen display, a light-weight case (made of metal and plastic), and an Ivy Bridge CPU, this notebook clearly isn't in the same class as a high-end ultrabook.
At nearly an inch thick, it's a bit too chunky to be called an ultrabook. You don't get a backlit keyboard. And while premium touchscreen devices tend to have edge-to-edge glass to support Windows 8 gestures that involve swiping from the edge, the VivoBook X202E does not.
Instead the display is surrounded by a plastic rim — and there's an extra-wide bezel around the display area, which gives you room to swipe from the edges of the screen.
The result is that while the VivoBook X202E has an 11.6 inch display, it's a little larger than some other notebooks with similar screen sizes. In fact, the laptop is a little wider than the 12.1 inch Asus UL20A notebook I bought in 2009.
Front: Asus VivoBook X202E / Back: Asus UL20A
That's not to say that the X202E is extraordinarily large or unwieldy. Its just a tad wider than you might expect an 11.6 inch notebook to be thanks to that extra-large bezel.
Asus also made sure to include an extra-large touchpad below the keyboard, giving you plenty of room to perform Windows 8 gestures including two-finger scrolling, 4-finger app switching, and swiping-from the edge (much the same way you would with the touchscreen).
Unfortunately I found the touchpad sensitivity to be a bit hit-or-miss. It's certainly not th
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