We’re not going to dwell too much on the ASUS Vivo Book F202 laptop. It’s a cheap 11.6in model that’s aimed at students and anyone else who wants a small, touchscreen-enabled laptop for under $500. The design of the notebook is strong considering the price – in fact, it looks a little like a baby Zenbook – and it’s a small and easily mobile device that you can chuck in a backpack. But there is no escaping the fact that it doesn’t have a fast processor and compact Asus Keyboard .
The Vivo Book F202 is based on an Intel Celeron CPU, which supplies performance that’s about twice as fast as some of the last netbooks we reviewed almost two years ago (some of which were based on the AMD C-50 APU, for example). You won’t want to use this laptop to perform media encoding tasks or anything else that will tax the CPU, and multitasking will have to be undertaken in moderation as well if you don’t want to notice too much of a slowdown in performance.
Basically, the Vivo Book F202 is a good machine for browsing the Web, using social media, typing up documents, listening to music, viewing photos and watching videos. The screen has 10-input capacitive touch that you can use to move around the Windows 8 Start screen, but the hardware is a conventional clamshell – and at 1.4kg, it’s a little bit on the heavy side for its 11.6in size, but it ships with a small and relatively light adapter, which offsets that somewhat.