Review Summary
Expert Rating
ASUS’s Vivobook family of laptops has a vast offering for consumers. From the vanilla Vivobook to the Vivobook Go, Vivobook S, and the Vivobook Pro lineup. While breaking down each series is a story in itself, know that it caters to various needs and price ranges, keeping portability and a rich feature set at the heart of each lineup. While some of the devices come with a traditional LCD, others come with an OLED display. You also have the option of a touchscreen with a convertible form factor and a stylus for your design needs.
Today, we have the ASUS Vivobook 14 Flip, which comes with a 14-inch FHD+ (1920x1200p) OLED touchscreen display with a 60Hz refresh rate and a stylus in the box. It is a lightweight laptop weighing about 1.5kg and boasts 28-hours+ battery life. Priced at about Rs 1.2L, is it a worthy contender in the premium laptop space?
Table of Contents
Key specifications at a glance
- Processor: Intel Core Ultra 7–256V
- Display: 14-inch 16:10 FHD+ (1920x 1200) OLED touchscreen display, 500nits peak brightness
- Refresh rate: 60Hz
- RAM: 16 GB LPDDR5X 8533MHz
- Storage: 512 GB PCIe Gen 4 SSD
- Wireless connectivity: Dual-band Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4
- Ports: 1 x Thunderbolt 4 USB-C DP+PD, 1 x USB3.2 Gen2 Type-C DP+PD, 1 x USB3.2 Gen1 Type-A, 1 x HDMI 2.1 TMDS, 1 x Micro SD Card reader, 1 x Audio combo jack
- Battery: 70Whr
- AC adapter: 65W
- Weight: ~1.5 Kg
Design, build and connectivity
Kicking things off with the design, we have a very minimal design perfect for the classroom as well as the boardroom. The entire laptop has this matte grey finish. To put it into perspective, it is darker and less glossy than the silver Macbook Air. The lid has “ASUS VIVOBOOK” written in a minimal reflective silver colour that looks elegant. Lift the lid, and you are greeted with the stunning 14-inch OLED Display that can “flip” 360 degrees (more on the display later).
The hinge is very strong, with minimal wobble for the display. You can lift the lid with a single finger, which is a testament to the hinge’s build quality and the machine’s overall weight distribution.
Next up is the keyboard, which is not a full-sized one but is large enough for a comfortable typing experience. It is a backlit keyboard, and you have three brightness settings for the backlighting. I wish there was an “auto” mode for the keyboard backlighting, but I’m nitpicking. Another thing to note is that the power button isn’t the last button on the top row; rather, it is the second-last button. I got used to this fairly quickly, and I see the appeal of this repositioning. There is no fingerprint security here.
Speaking of security, the webcam supports Windows Hello and features a physical shutter (nice).
Moving over to the trackpad, it is fairly large, smooth to the touch, and supports the standard multitouch we have come to expect from modern Windows laptops. In addition to the standard multi-touch, the laptop also supports ASUS Smart Gestures. These gestures include swiping up and down on the left and right edge of the trackpad (vertically) to increase/decrease the volume and brightness, respectively. You can also swipe horizontally on the top edge to fast-forward/rewind viewed content. It is a nice touch, and we have seen something similar from Acer on their SWIFT Go OLED laptops, with the biggest difference being that the trackpad houses physical media controls on the Acer laptop, which pops up with a simple swipe.
Overall, the laptop’s robust aluminium alloy construction is a good choice. Its rectangular design with contoured edges makes it comfortable to type on and carry.
The left of the laptop houses all the ports (mentioned in the key specifications above), except one USB-A port, which is on the right, where you will also find the exhaust. The bottom of the laptop has an intake of fresh air to keep the laptop cool, so don’t use it on a pillow. Rather use it in its tablet mode or tent mode for consuming content on the bed. It’s very convenient that way.
Display
Once you go OLED, there is no going back. The ASUS Vivobook 14 Flip has a gorgeous 14-inch OLED display. The 16:10 aspect ratio gives you a little more headroom for documents, Excel sheets, and scrolling through websites. You do get slightly thicker black bars at the top and bottom when watching movies on streaming services, but after a couple of hours, you get used to it. It’s probably the only con of having a 16:10 display. Speaking of cons, my only other problem with the OLED display is how reflective it is. In my office, the seat where I sit has a lot of direct light, and I had to tilt the display in a very specific position to avoid all the light reflections (thank God for exceptional viewing angles on the laptop).
Apart from that, the display is a dream to work on/consume content. Movies look stunning with deep blacks and accurate skin tones, and even everyday work like typing documents and working on spreadsheets looks great. The refresh rate is 60Hz, which is fine for a productivity laptop, and while the pixel peepers in you might want something higher than an FHD+ display, for most of us, it gets the job done. The display boasts 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut coverage, DisplayHDR 500 True Black certification, and TÜV Rheinland certification.
The laptop has a touchscreen display, and while I do not like touching the display (for fingerprint and smudge reasons), I found it quite convenient to scroll through 100+ slide PPTs, play and pause content in tablet or tent mode, and quickly switch between tabs. If you use the touchscreen a lot, then know that it is responsive to the lightest touch (in a good way), and pinching to zoom also works when looking at some graphs and stats.
Audio
Moving over to the sound output, the laptop has two bottom-firing speakers, and when kept on a table, they shine. The speakers can get loud and are quite clear for laptop speakers. When I watch a few episodes of Succession on JioHotstar, some movies on Netflix, or some videos on YouTube, the laptop speakers get loud. My only problem is that when using it in tent mode or tablet mode, there is no way to “conveniently” reduce or increase the volume akin to how one would do it on an actual tablet – via a volume rocker. Don’t expect deep bass or accurate instruments when listening to music, but for what’s on offer here, the speakers are good.
Performance
Let’s get down to brass tacks – the performance of the ASUS Vivobook 14 Flip! Below is a look at some synthetic benchmarks of the ASUS Vivobook 14 Flip compared to similarly priced laptops. In our suite of synthetic benchmarks, the Intel Core Ultra 7 256V performs quite well, outputting decent scores across the board. It has respectable numbers in both versions of Cinebench, PCMark 10, and GeekBench while also impressing with its GPU performance.
When compared to the competition, the new Intel Core Ultra 7–256V does have a better single-core performance but falls short in Cinebench R24’s multi-core performance against the Vivobook S 14 powered by the AMD Ryzen 9 HX 370. It is, however, in line with what we see on the Microsoft Surface Pro powered by the Snapdragon X Plus chipset. It’s a similar story when looking at GeekBench as well, with Intel offering a good lead in single-core performance, but falling short in multi-core tests.
Moving over to the GPU performance, the tables have turned in favour of Intel. It outperforms the AMD Ryzen 9 HX 370 and Snapdragon Elite, which is commendable.
In PC mark battery tests, the Intel Core Ultra 7-256V-powered Vivobook 14 Flip has a clear advantage. It lasted for a whopping 23hr 25min, as compared to the 11hr 2min of the Vivobook S14 and the 12Hr 51Mins of the Snapdragon-powered Omnibook.
Moving over to real-world performance, I got two days of heavy productivity and some entertainment from this laptop, which was about 18 hours of use, which is very good. During my time, I worked on many presentations, did some Excel work, wrote a part of this review, wrote part of another review, and replied to emails, all while having my 45 tabs open in Chrome. Even if you use this laptop for video editing, photo editing, and using the stylus to draw, it should work very well.
Gaming
We played GTA V and Valorant on the laptop to see how well it works for casual gaming, and the device did not disappoint. We recorded an average of 108 FPS in GTA V and 256 FPS in Valorant. As for the settings, for GTA V, we played the game with MSAA set to 4X, Reflection at 4X, and Anisotropic filtering set to X16. For Valorant, we played the game at High with MSAA set to 2X. To put things into perspective, the Omnibook ran GTA V at an average of 49 FPS (with the same settings), and the Zenbook S 16 powered by the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 gave us a frame rate of 50 FPS and 165 FPS, respectively.
Needless to say, the ASUS Vivobook 14 Flip can easily play most casual games. To truly marvel at the OLED display, I suggest you fire up a title like Ori and the Will of the Wisps. The game looks stunning in HDR on the OLED display.
AI
AI is still in its nascent days on the PC (if you don’t count gaming), and we have started running Geekbench AI as a benchmark. Tasks in Microsoft Copilot on the laptop to help find locations, write emails, generate cat images, etc, worked fine during my use.
Verdict
The ASUS Vivobook 14 Flip is a great machine for everyday productivity and portability and has excellent battery life. The OLED display is stunning, and it has adequate connectivity options for daily use. The 2-in-1 form factor makes it easy to consume content, especially when lying on a bed, without worrying about blocking the intake vents for thermal management. While the device has a stylus, I will let more capable designers judge that aspect. What it lacks is that the display can get very reflective under direct sunlight, and the touchpad could have some markings for the ASUS Smart Gestures. The Intel Core Ultra 7-256V powering this laptop lacks pure synthetic CPU numbers compared to the AMD Ryzen 9-HX 370 available on similarly priced laptops. However, it makes up for the same with the integrated Intel ARC GPU.
If a laptop with good battery life and seamless everyday productivity is what you want, you can consider this laptop. As of me writing this review, Apple just announced the M4 Macbook Air for Rs 99,990 in India with 16GB RAM and the M4 chip, which is quite capable. While I know the ASUS Vivobook has a better display, there is no denying Apple’s M4 performance. Then there is the army of Snapdragon X Elite, X Plus, and X-powered laptops in the market, a glimpse of whose performance we have highlighted in this review. So you may want to consider your options carefully based on the use case before investing.
Editor’s rating: 8 / 10
Pros
- Fantastic battery life
- Good build with a comfortable keyboard
- Great display with convertible form factor
- Windows Hello with camera shutter
Cons
- The raw performance could have been better
- Very reflective display