ASUS Flagship Transformer Book Flip TP200SA 2-in-1
ASUS Transformer Book Flip TP200SA is the brand new touchscreen 2-in-1 notebook that also turns into tablet by simply flipping the screen around its very solid hinge. I’m actually typing on it right now and I used it for a couple of Youtube videos with up to six Chrome browsers and another on Microsoft Edge open with a Wordpad document with music playing in the background and it all seemed to be nice and smooth without much lagging at all and the nicely spaced out keys are fine to type on so far (1.6mm keyboard travel) and there is a touchpad that measures 105 x 61mm- larger than competitors. You have the dual core entry level Braswell Intel Celeron N3050 processor with a Passmark benchmark score of 912 on the day of my review (similar benchmark points with the Atom processor found on similar models but Atom uses much more battery), at 1.6GHz speed that goes up to 2.16GHz with turbo boost and a 2GB DDR3L SDRAM memory at 1600MHz which is also better than what we have seen before but 2GB is more or less standard for machines at this level. 32GB eMMC is also not a lot but is faster than a mechanical drive and not as snappy as SSD but you will be using Cloud storage more or you can just get an extra 32GB or an external hard drive storage to connect to USB port- good news is there are three USB ports: USB 3.0, USB 2.0 and a USB 3.1 Gen. 1 (Type C) port.
Wireless is the latest 802.11ac variety (Miracast enabled) that we are used to seeing on more expensive computers and it has the latest Bluetooth 4.1. Operating system is Windows 10 and although I’m mostly on Imac for my work, Win 10 also seems to be quite user friendly and starts up fast. You will get a free one year of Office 365 Personal which is good if you will be using Word, Excel or Powerpoint for your presentations, as I can’t see why this little 2 in 1 can not be used for work presentations and it seems to be working just fine with spreadsheets, again without delays when I also had a couple of browsers open. 10 finger multi-touch function works well on the glass covered solid feeling screen with a metal lid which I think is one of its best features and although the palmrest or keyboard area and underneath is plastic, Transformer Book TP200SA has a beautiful modern design for how much it costs. It comes with a glossy 11.6 inch high definition WXGA touch display with 1366 x 768 pixel resolution color rich IPS panel with up to 178 degree viewing angles and 16:9 image aspect ratio, it is not amazing but offers adequate resolution and good contrast at this level and lack of Full HD is its weaker point but definitely adequate too as you have the PWM controlled brightness (at 190Mhz). Having FHD with the current 2 cell 38Whrs battery would have certainly affected the battery performance which is an impressive 8 hours (7 hours 36 mins on one of the PCMark tests).
Silver and black Asus Transformer Book weighs only 2.58 pounds in total which is less than half the weight of an average 15 inch laptop and measures 11.69 x 7.92 x 0.72 inches and it is really lightweight, slim and portable. There is a 0.3megapixel front facing webcam and it is OK for casual chats on Skype but the resolution is not perfect, not like high definition but does the job for sure. You will obviously not find an Optical DVD drive or Ethernet port but apart from the three USB ports, it comes with a micro HDMI port (you may need an adapter for connecting regular HDMI cable) to view the content on your LED TV, a micro SD/SDHC/SDXC Card Reader and a Headphone out/Mic in combo. And on that note, the sound quality through the stereo speakers is better than average for this segment of computers and for its small size as Asus seems to do a good job with the SonicMaster- clear and not tinny. This is not a gaming machine, you can only play the light games on the internet- such as Facebook games as there is only so much the integrated Intel HD graphics 400 (Braswell) with shared memory with the Celeron processor can handle. Celeron is no powerhouse despite being a very modern Braswell processor that was released in 2015 and if you’re looking for something to use when you’re out and about or on your travels and if you will mainly be using Word and Excel, surfing the internet, listening to songs or watching movies and do other basic daily things- it handles music and videos quite wall without lagging or stuttering.
Click here for a closer look on Amazon