<div>Asus’ Vivobooks bring affordable touch world of everyday notebooks. Windows 8 certainly has put new life into notebooks. For instance, did we think touch screens on laptops would arrive so soon and be within the reach of average customers and not just those who have no end of money to spend on new electronics? I certainly didn’t think there was any chance of owning a touchscreen notebook anytime soon and yet, my next is definitely going to be a touch device.<br /><br />But all that’s on the inside. Externally, the Asus Vivobook S400 is a big but light 14-inch laptop. The lid is what I like to think of as “aluminum silk,” smooth, metallic, cold and businesslike. The Asus logo glints even more metallicly in the centre. On the sides, the Vivobook is teardrop shaped, but thicker than you’ll see on ultrabooks and the Macbook Air. There are a lot of ports there – three USB ports, HDMI, VGA, SD card reader, Ethernet port, and headphones slot. The bottom of the laptop is made of that soft rubbery plastic that has become most popular these days. It’s nice to touch, but may pick upsome oil spots. <br /><br />The Vivobook is not an Ultrabook. It still has a hard disk (500GB) though it also has a 24GB SSD (the type of drives found on ultrabooks) to make it boot up faster, which it does. The device has 4GB of RAM and an Intel Core i5-3317U (Ivy Bridge) driving it all. <br /><br />The touch screen is not the brightest or most vivid, but it’s responsive and doesn’t suffer from compromised viewing angles. It’s a mid-range screen, by all accounts. I suppose it’s partly that the fact that you can use a touch screen and do so fluidly, has you forgiving the fact that it isn’t a brilliant looking screen. The keyboard could have certainly been made better by giving the keys more leeway to move as keys that are too depressed into the chassis are obviously harder to type on. The trackpad is perfectly adequate. There’s an 11-inch sister Vivobook, the S200. The Vivobooks cost Rs 59,999 and Rs 39,999.<br /><br /><strong>Samsung's Ativ Smart PC 500T</strong><br /><img width="250" height="196" align="right" alt="" src="/image/image_gallery?uuid=5b005603-186d-48f1-a16c-12a21b74c815&groupId=36166&t=1360682949948" />The Ativ Smart PC 500T is an 11.6-inch tablet-laptop hybrid costing Rs 53,990. As a tablet, it’s large, landscapey. Don’t expect to curl up with it as with a Kindle. But, you can use it to browse the web and see the whole page in portrait mode. There’s a lot of screen space, so it’s also interesting for creation work, especially since you have an S-Pen with it.<br /><br />The blue-grey textured lid is of the same plastic as the Galaxy Note II. The keyboard is metallic silver. I found the slot for the tablet to dock a bit iffy and although it may not drop out when you lift the open laptop, it can fly right out when the tablet is closing. The tablet and keyboard kept disconnecting.<br /><br />The screen, a 1366 x 768 p has good colours and contrasts. There’s 2GB of RAM and a 64GB hard drive. You have a USB 2.0 port, HDMI, and SD card slot. The dock has additional USB ports. The battery on the tablet lasts about 10 hours.There’s an 8MP camera with flash and a secondary 2MP. It runs on an Intel Atom processor, which means you can run applications like Photoshop but it’s slower than Core-I devices. But then, it also costs less.</div>
BW Reporters
Mala Bhargava has been writing on technology well before the advent of internet in Indians and before CDs made their way into computers. Mala writes on technology, social media, startups and fitness. A trained psychologist, she claims that her understanding of psychology helps her understand the human side of technology.
