ASUS launched its convertible laptop – ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX370 in India about four months ago. This version updates this convertible with latest 8th generation Coffee-lake processors by Intel along with the usual top-end specifications.
This laptop takes a head-on with other hybrid laptops like Dell’s XPS 13, Razer Blade Stealth, HP Spectre x360 and even Microsoft Surface laptop. So, does the ZenBook Flip S manage to create a compelling package when compared to its competitor, let’s find out.
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ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX370: Design
The Flip S has undoubtedly a great design and aesthetics. The standout feature of this laptop is the hinge, which is well built to turn the Flip S from a standard laptop to a tablet. Well, the Royal Blue finish of the laptop initially looked beautiful, but picks up fingerprints very easily.
Coming at 2.42lbs in weight, this is one of the lightest convertibles we reviewed so far. Moreover, this is claimed to world’s thinnest convertible and at just 0.43-inch it certainly seems to be. Not to mention the lightweight design makes this laptop ultra-portable. Even the power brick is small enough to take along with you without much hassle.
PORTS
There is a slight downside of the super- sleek design is less room for ports. The Flip S has only a pair of USB 3.1 Type-C slots. There is a volume rocker on the side, next to the power button, which is useful when you’re using it in tablet mode. The other edge component of note is the fingerprint sensor, which is tiny, but works well.
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ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX370: Display
The Flip S comes with a 13.3-inch display with Nano-deign which looks really good – vivid and bright but sometimes produces glare on the screen, by that I mean that it doesn’t give out the best viewing experience.
Apart from that, the display is touch capable so that you can use your fingers to interact with Windows to use the bundled stylus to ink, scribble, or draw especially when in the tablet mode. Furthermore, the laptop doesn’t oversaturate colors hence the display seems more real and life-like.
ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX370: Keyboard & TrackPad
What goes with the thin and lightweight laptops or convertibles are that you get pushed to use not so friendly keyboard, but not in this case. The backlit keyboard of Flip S is stiff with a good key travel and no flexible frame. The keyboard layout is quite spread out and you will quickly get used to it.
Coming to the trackpad the Flip S sports a reasonably large trackpad that comes with support for precision drivers by Windows and the glass surface made it easy to use, but it did encounter some occasional hiccups. The tiny fingerprint scanner on the right side of the device works as intended helping you to unlock the device with the help of Windows Hello authentication.
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ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX370: Performance
The laptop is powered by eight-gen Intel i7-8550U CPU clocked at 1.8GHz with a turbo frequency of up to4GHz along with 16GB RAM, which was more than enough to power up my day that includes 6-8 hours of typing on the word, 2 hours of video and music streaming and concurrently working on Chrome with 10-15 tabs open at any given time.
Coming to handling the minor Photoshop edits, the fan cranked up the speed keeping the system cool while exporting out the file. I did find some evident lag while playing PUBG and Fortnite, thanks to the lack of dedicated graphics. This laptop is definitely not for hardcore gamers.
Few Notable Things?
As mentioned, this laptop just has two USB-C ports, so ASUS has included an adapter where it gives us the option to plug in an HDMI (full), USB-A and last one is USB-C port. I’m happy that ASUS has bundled this adapter, but it would have been great if there were two Type A ports instead of one. Well, I ended up living the dongle life of course because it doesn’t have an ethernet port too.
ASUS has claimed quite high about the battery life of this laptop, in the real world battery performance is different and the device lasted anywhere from 4.5 hours to 6 hours depending on the brightness and operation.
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ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX370: Sound And WebCam
Being a business kind laptop or convertible, the webcam was decent, nothing amazing and ASUS has packed bottom firing speakers with the device, which makes the sounding awkward as the downwards speakers reflect back the sound to the users, which is not ideal.
ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX370: Verdict
ASUS has managed to build a worthy package which checks almost all the requirements for a modern, high performance (but lack of dedicated graphics card is a bummer), premium looking convertible. That said, the device has some minors flaws that could pretty evidently be a deal breaker.
As I mentioned, this laptop is more or like for business people, which clearly reflect in the pricing of the laptop viz Rs 1,30,990. Although I understand the reason for the pricing, but I think it should have been slightly priced aggressively especially considering the competitors like Dell XPS 13 or Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon, which level up the price to performance.
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