ON PAPER, the new Asus Vivobook 13 Slate
OLED looks pretty sweet. What’s not to
like about a 13-inch convertible tablet
with a quad-core Intel CPU, slick design,
OLED display, and loads of bundled
hardware for just $599?
For one thing, Asus’s claim that this
tablet can double as both your PC and
your OLED TV is pretty silly. But this
is one heck of a package for the price.
Unfortunately, the Vivobook also turns
out to be something of a dud. How so?
First, it’s worth going through that full
feature set. The 13.3-inch OLED panel is
the showbiz bit, of course. It’s rated at
a punchy 550 nits for peak brightness,
sports 1080p native resolution, 0.2ms
response times, and 100 percent
coverage of the demanding DCI-P3
cinema color space. Nifty.
Then there’s the design. The Vivobook
is slim at just 8mm, with fairly narrow
bezels and a nicely engineered feel. It’s
a quality bit of kit. Connectivity-wise,
you get two high-speed USB-C ports, a
microSD slot, and WiFi 6. Included in the
price, you get both a snap-on magnetic
kickstand and a clip-on keyboard.
The keyboard is pretty tactile for a
slim model, with 1.4mm of key travel
and a large trackpad. Augmenting the
touchscreen and rounding out the input
devices is an Asus Pen 2.0, which boasts
a 266Hz sample rate, albeit tempered by
the OLED panel’s low 60Hz refresh rate.
Further details include a 5MP
forward-facing camera, plus another
13MP camera on the rear, Dolby Atmos
audio support with quad speakers, and a
50WHr battery. There’s also 8GB of DDR4Affordable but flawed OLED awesomeness
Asus Vivobook 13
Slate OLED
5
VERDICT Asus Vivobook 13 Slate OLEDOLE, OLE, OLED Impressive
feature set for the money;
nice build quality.
OH NO, OH NO Very weak CPU
performance; OLED ain’t all that.
$599, http://www.asus.comSPECIFICATIONS
CPU Intel Pentium Silver N6000
Graphics Intel UHD integrated
RAM 8GB DDR4 RAM
Screen 13.3-inch 1080p OLED
Storage 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD
Ports 2x USB-C, MicroSD
Connectivity WiFi 6 (802.11ax) +Bluetooth
5.2 (Dual band) 2x2
Camera 5MP front, 13MP rear
Weight 1.72lbs
Size 12.20 x 7.48 x 0.31 inchesmemory and a 256GB NVMe SSD to go
with that quad-core Intel chip, but this is
where the Vivobook’s troubles begin.
Specifically, it’s an Intel Pentium
Silver N6000 with four cores and a peak
burst speed of 3.3GHz. Sounds decent?
Sadly, it’s born of Intel’s low-power Atom
lineage, not the high-performance Intel
Core family. If you’re thinking maybe it’s
related to the surprisingly impressive
‘Efficient’ cores in the new Alder Lake
CPUs, unfortunately, that’s not the case.
The Pentium’s performance is, to put it
bluntly, feeble. Installing large apps takes
forever, despite the 256GB SSD and 8GB
of DDR4 memory. Loading proper apps
takes an age, and forget about anything
graphically intensive. The Pentium
chip’s integrated graphics are hopeless.
Even the Windows 11 UI can feel laggy
at times, though the Vivobook is good at
video playback, including demanding 4K
streams.
That means that for video consumption,
this is a compelling device. The fantastic
contrast and colors from the OLED
display make sure of that. The nine hours
of video playback you can expect help,
too. The catch is that the 1080p OLED
panel is less convincing on the Windows
desktop. It’s not especially sharp and
doesn’t render fonts crisply. That’s partly
down to pixel density—1,920x1,080 isn’t
spectacular by tablet standards. We also
suspect that the OLED panel may have
a non-RGB subpixel structure, which is
never a good thing for font rendering.
All of which makes the Asus Vivobook
a rather flawed proposition. The system
performance is poor enough to put youoff making the most of features such
as the input pen or treating this device
as good for anything but video and light
web browsing. The showpiece OLED
display is excellent in some regards but
not an overall win against, say, a higher
resolution IPS panel.
So, what starts out looking like a
compelling value proposition ends up
disappointing all but the lightest of users.
It doesn’t deliver a pleasant computing
experience and ultimately adds up to less
than the sum of the Vivobook’s mostly
impressive parts. –JEREMY LAIRDBENCHMARKSAsus Vivobook 13 Slate OLED
3DMark Fire Strike 1,100
Cinebench R20 Multi-core (points) 628
GeekBench 5 single-core (points) 686
GeekBench 5 multi-core (points) 1,913
PCMark 10 Home Test (points) 2,632
PCMark 10 Battery Life (h:m) 7:29
Video playback Battery Life (h:m) 9:05
Metro Exodus, 1080p, Ultra (fps) 5in the lab
76 MAXIMU MPC MAR 2022