Pros
-Incredibly cheap
at under £300
-Performance that
beats some low-end laptops up to double the price
-Decent keyboard
Cons
-Occasionally
stutters
-Runs quite warm
-Don’t expect to
play many games on it
Key Features: 11.6-inch 1366x768 touchscreen display;
1.24kg; Intel Celeron 1007U 1.5Ghz Processor; 4GB RAM; 500GB 5,400rpm hard
drive
Manufacturer: Asus
Asus X200CA review
What is the Asus X200CA?
We’ve looked at a handful of Asus’s laptops of late,
including the budget X550CA that offered cheap and cheerful performance and
warranted an 8/10 given its £330 price tag. Well, now we’ve got another budget
Asus model: the X200CA is an 11.6-inch laptop, that would once have fit
comfortably into the netbook category. It’s cheaper than the X550CA at a penny
less than £300, but does the loss of screen space and bulk give a
disproportionate hit to performance? Its small size and low price means Asus
has the student market in its sights with this one, but it could potentially
appeal to anyone who needs a simple no-frills ultraportable.
Asus X200CA – Design & Build Quality
The X200CA
certainly is small, as laptops go. 11.6-inch
laptops are still pretty rare, and although it doesn’t have the closed width of
the Macbook Air (0.68-inches), at just over an inch thick, it’s pretty svelte.
Still, it manages to give off a slightly chunky vibe, aided by it’s 11.6-inch
width as well as the all plastic casing, with Asus eschewing the current
fashion of brushed aluminum for something that bit cheaper.
As Nokia and now Apple has done with their plastic shelled
mobiles, Asus has revelled in this plastic feel and offers a choice of four
colours: ‘Hot Pink’, ‘Ocean Blue’, ‘Gentle Black’ and ‘Elegant White’. Ours is
in the last of these, and although we don’t have any issues with the aesthetic,
'elegant' is putting it a bit strongly.
The plastic shell is lightly textured and adds slightly
curved corners to its mostly angular design. A single Asus logo is the only
mark on the white topside of the laptop. Opening it up presents a pretty
minimalist inside as well. The keyboard area (including the keys and trackpad)
maintain the white colouring, and only Intel and HDMI logos sully the case
here. A small silver power button in the top right hand corner is slightly at
odds with the colour scheme, but otherwise it works well.
As it’s an 11.6-inch keyboard, the keys are slightly wedged
in and there’s no room for a number pad, but more on that later. The screen is
the only part of the design that drops the white colour, with a thick black
bezel all the way around, with just a webcam and another ASUS logo deviating
from the blank appearance.
It’s solidly built, and it feels like it could take a few
knocks, especially with its plastic design being harder to scratch than the
brushed aluminum finishes favoured by more expensive laptops. Connectivity
wise, it’s got a VGA out, HDMI port and USB slot on the left hand side, and an
ethernet port, SD Card reader and two more USB ports on the right.
Asus X200CA – Screen and Sound Quality
While it packs the same 1366x768 resolution as many
15.6-inch laptops, which should make it look super-crisp on a smaller screen,
the display is a disappointment all round. The caveat here is that it’s under
£300 for a touchscreen laptop, but the details still don’t make for too good
reading.
The brightness in particular is very poor. Even at its
brightest setting, it recorded just 123 nits in our tests, where any score
below 200 is considered bad. Better than 350 is considered outstanding, and to
put that into perspective the Microsoft Surface Pro 2013 scored 422. The Delta
E mark for colour differentiation was also below average at 5.19 (anything
below two is very good) The contrast at 311:1 is equally poor, but the
temperature of 7,169K isn’t too much warmer than the ideal of 6,500K.
As the screen is uncomfortably reflective, viewing angles
suffer accordingly, and the colour suffers the more you deviate from facing the
screen straight on. Even the expected crispness of a 1,366 x 768 resolution on
such a small display isn’t quite as good as you’d imagine, with icons not
appearing as sharp as we’d expect.
On the bright side, the touch functions work well, although
the limited screen dimensions makes the Windows 8 desktop mode particularly
fiddly - though that’s a long-standing issue with the O/S rather than the
laptop itself. Our beef is with Microsoft there, not Asus.
Sound on the X200CA is no great shakes. While we’ve recently
looked at laptops boasting of Bang & Olufson, Beats Audio or Harman Kardon
sound systems, Asus' latest is unbranded. The result is the kind of tinny sound
you’d expect, but no worse than most laptops where channels are indistinct and
bass is close to nonexistent.
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