What is the Asus Zenbook Flip S?
Asus has long been at the forefront of thin and light laptop design for Windows users, and the Zenbook Flip S is just the latest example of what it can do. This stunning convertible laptop sports an all-metal exterior and its screen can flip round so that it can be used as a tablet.
Such a premium design doesn’t come cheap, though, so you’ll be looking at the better part of £1200 for one of these machines. But with that outlay should come one of the finest Windows laptop/tablet experiences around. Should.
Asus Zenbook Flip S – Design
Impressively thin, light and beautiful laptops aren’t exactly a rarity these days, but the sheer class of the Flip S is still a cut above. For a start, it’s incredibly slim and light, measuring 131 x 218 x 10.9mm and weighing just 1.1kg. For a convertible laptop with a relatively heavy glass-fronted screen, that’s mighty impressive.
The exterior is also all-metal, which gives an instantly premium feel. It also feels nice to the touch, unlike some aluminium laptops that have a slightly too aggressive brushed effect to them. The top is patterned with Asus’ signature concentric circles, but it remains smooth.
Asus’ intriguing choice of a dark blue chassis with gold highlights and backlighting – a dark grey version is also available – may not appeal to everyone, at least at first, but it does work surprisingly well. It’s something a little different without feeling forced, plus the yellow backlighting on the keys is more mellow and a touch less distracting than bright white.
Being a convertible design, the hinge is all-important to this laptop, and thankfully it passes muster. It’s easy to flip the screen round into its tablet orientation, plus it stays put at whatever angle you place it. Also, the weight of the screen doesn’t make the laptop top-heavy, so it isn’t prone to toppling backwards.
However, despite Asus’ best efforts, in its tablet form this is still a fairly heavy and slightly unwieldy device. It just can’t be helped, as you’ve got the thickness of the whole lower section sitting behind the screen, plus said screen is 13.3 inches across – an iPad Mini this thing is not.
This still very much feels like a premium thin and light laptop with a touchscreen first, and a tablet device second. Rather than for everyday use, the tablet form factor here is great for drawing and is can be nice to perch on the lap and watch a film, when lounging in certain positions.
Plus there’s a position where you rest the laptop on its keys and have the screen flipped up at the front, which is great for watching video in cramped spaces like planes and coaches, as well as just bringing the screen closer in when you’ve got it sat on your lap.
As with many 2-in-1 laptops, one of the concessions to the tablet form factor is that the power button is placed on the side. Sometimes this can be a bit awkward, as it’s difficult to locate, especially if you’ve got several things plugged in next to it.
However, here there’s no connectivity in front of the button so it soon became a natural motion to just slide a finger along the side until it finds the button. That said, every now and then I did accidentally press it while picking up the laptop.
Beyond the power button is the volume rocker – a welcome addition from the tablet world, as it saves on keyboard space – then after that is a fingerprint reader. Despite being a sliver of a thing, it works well. Windows Hello prompts you to press your finger on the reader from different angles when setting it up, and as a result when logging in the system coped surprisingly well with whether the laptop is in laptop mode or tablet orientation.
The final feature of the right edge is a USB Type-C socket, something which is mirrored on the left edge. In front of that is a headphone jack.
That’s it for your connectivity, though. That may not sound too bad, but this laptop does charge off USB Type-C, so one of those ports is occupied when you’re running off mains power. It’s good, then, that Asus includes a dongle in the box that adds a full-size USB port, HDMI port and a further Type-C port. It would be nice to have an SD card reader too, but overall it’s not a bad selection.
Just how irked you are by having to carry around dongles is largely down to personal preference, but considering the size of this laptop Asus’ solution seems like a reasonable compromise.
Asus Zenbook Flip S – Keyboard and trackpad
It’s clear from the first moment of using this laptop’s keyboard and trackpad that they are both top-notch.
The keyboard has a spacious and intuitive layout, with none of the odd key placements or squashed keys of some laptops. The backlighting also works really well with nice even, easy-to-read lettering. As mentioned above, it’s also really nice that the yellow colouring is bit easier on the eye, though light spilling out from the side of the keys is still white – thankfully it’s not too noticeable.
The key action is also excellent, with a crisp and even response that means you know precisely when you’ve hit a key. Accomplished touch typists will be right at home on this device.
As for the trackpad, it’s nice and large, making it easy to accurately track across the whole screen in one go. Its aluminium surface is also wonderfully smooth, so your fingers glide effortlessly across it. Tracking is also very accurate and the click action is light yet crisp. It’s simply a joy to use.
You can also use the Asus Pen with this laptop. It looks just like an Apple Pencil and functions in largely the same way. It’s great for if you want to draw on the screen or just generally to interact with more intricate stuff while the device is in tablet mode.
However, there’s nowhere to dock the device and no way to charge it either, with it instead using a single disposable AAA battery that Asus claims will last up to ten months. It boasts 1000 levels of pressure sensitivity with 10g activation force, which is decent but doesn’t match the 4096 levels of the Microsoft Surface’s stylus.
Overall it seemed reasonably responsive and accurate, though the tilt prediction didn’t seem to be all that clever. That is, if you tilt the Pen as you would when holding a pen or pencil, the tip doesn’t feel like it’s hitting the place you’re putting it. It’s possible this can be tweaked in software, though.
THE END I NEED COMMENTAsus Zenbook Flip S – Screen and speakers
For the most part the Flip S’ screen is excellent. It uses a quality IPS LCD panel which provides accurate colours and good viewing angles. It also boasts a seemingly ample 1080p resolution. Certainly, compared to the vast majority of laptops, it’s well up there.
However, there are a couple of areas where it doesn’t quite compete with the very best.
Starting with the good stuff, though, it produces an excellent 1248:1 contrast ratio that makes for a deep, vibrant image with none of the washed-out quality that lower-contrast displays suffer from.
Its overall colour reproduction is decent too. It covers 84.1% of the sRGB colour space, which is a little below the best, but still more than good enough for a laptop of this type. Its Delta E score of 0.11 also shows it can pick out fine differences in colour properly. You could certainly get away with professional image and video editing on this screen.
Its 1080p resolution is also plenty for general laptop use. Many 27-inch monitors have the same resolution, so on a screen this small it makes for a sharp image and provides the option of having a surprisingly large desktop, even if everything will appear very small.
Screen image quality
- Colour temperature: 8021K
- Contrast: 1289:1
- Maximum brightness: 30nits
- Black level: 0.23nits
- Delta E: 0.11
- sRGB coverage: 84.1%
- Gamma: 2.46
However, while the 1080p (1920 x 1080 pixels) resolution is ample for laptop use, when it comes to tablet use you do notice the pixels. We hold phones and tablets closer to our eyes, and as a result it takes a higher pixel density to achieve a perfectly smooth, non-pixelated image. In comparison, most phones now have at least the same resolution as this laptop but on a 5-inch screen, while a tablet such as 9.7-inch iPad has a resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels.
Asus also offers the Flip S in a 4K resolution version, but this doesn’t appear to be available anywhere.
The other area where it slips up slightly is that its colour temperature is a bit high, at 8021K – the ideal is 6500K. What does that mean? Well, for most users, not much. In isolation the display looks accurate and fairly true to life. However, set against a calibrated display you can see that the display looks a little bit too blue. This means that people editing pictures and video in any professional capacity will want to calibrate the display properly. Hardly a deal breaker, but some other laptops – notably Apple MacBooks – tend to be calibrated a little better right out of the box.
As for this laptop’s speakers, they’re surprisingly good. Overall volume and bass response isn’t exactly room-filling, but there’s a clarity, depth and sound stage here that belies the laptop’s size. It works great for watching video, though if you’re listening to music for any length of time you’ll probably want to get an external speaker or hook up your headphones.
Asus Zenbook Flip S – Performance
Being a slim and light laptop, it’s no surprise the Flip S isn’t a powerhouse. However, crucially it isn’t lumbered with one of the really slow processors you get in some very slim laptops.
Instead, you get an Intel Core i7-7500U, which is pretty much the defacto standard laptop processor right now. With its two physical processing cores and ability to deal with four workloads at the same time, thanks to hyperthreading, it powers through any normal desktop workload and is even up to the task of things like basic video editing.
Putting that into numbers, in the system benchmark Geekbench 4 the Flip S delivered scores of 4286 (single) and 8521 (multi), which compares to 3623/6802 for the Lenovo 720S and 3694/7537 for the Microsoft Surface Laptop. Meanwhile, in PCMark 8 it managed 2927 points, compared to 2605 for the Surface Laptop.
You also get an impressively large 512GB SSD for storage. Many laptops of this type still only provide 128GB or 256GB so to get 512GB is welcome – although given the price of this laptop, you certainly are paying for it.
It’s not the fastest SSD I’ve ever seen, clocking up read/write figures of 483MB/s and 362MB/s in AS SSD, but it’s still plenty fast enough for most uses.
The graphics processor in the 7500U can also turn its hand to a bit of light gaming, but it’s only really capable of playing older, more graphically simple titles at fairly low framerates. In the Ice Storm benchmark of 3DMark it scored 67,269 points.
At first I thought the Flip S was achieving its reasonably impressive performance without the aid of a fan to cool the processor, which is sometimes possible with less powerful chips. However, it was just a case of Asus cleverly hiding the cooling on the side of the laptop and the fan remaining reasonably quiet. If you’re really taxing the processor it will get a bit blowy for a while, but largely it remains unobtrusive.
One disadvantage of such a slim laptop is that upgrade potential is next to zero, but if you do fancy making some changes yourself, the bottom can be removed and the SSD swapped out.
Asus Zenbook Flip S – Battery Life
One of the problems with making laptops so thin is that there’s less room for a bigger battery, and this is the main problem with this laptop. If you expect your laptop to last a working day, or a long-haul flight, then the Flip S simply isn’t up to the task.
Asus claims the thing will last up to 11.5 hours, but this can surely only be when the laptop is at minimum brightness and when doing basically nothing. In a more realistic scenario where the screen is at 70% brightness (150 nits) it lasted just 5hrs 22mins in our PowerMark benchmark, which continuously loops playing some video then browsing the web.
Many other slim and light laptops last over 8hrs using the same test, and some can push beyond 10hrs. Even dropping the brightness to 30% (75 nits), which is low enough to only be practical to use in complete darkness, the laptop only lasted 13mins longer.
Exactly how much battery life you consider to be essential is something of a personal preference, but considering this laptop’s focus on portablility I’d say it’s right on the limit of what’s acceptable.
Why buy the Asus Zenbook Flip S?
Despite it’s slightly underwhelming battery life, there’s a heck of a lot to like about the Asus Flip S. Its design and build quality, and in fact the quality of just about every aspect of it, is top-class. Certainly, as far as high-end slim and light laptops go, it’s right up there with the best.
It also functions reasonably well as a 2-in-1, with its flip-round screen. The rotating hinge works very nicely, and the impressive dimensions of the chassis, plus the quality of the screen/touchscreen, mean it gets closer than most.
However, it is still a bit too bulky as a tablet. Plus, Windows still isn’t a great experience when used in its tablet mode. The Asus Pen works really well for drawing and generally interacting with the touchscreen, but for more casual tablet use it feels too fiddly and it’s a shame there’s nowhere to dock it.
Still, if you’re in the market for a high-end slim and light laptop or a 2-in-1, the Flip S is well worth a look.
Verdict
Stunning design and good overall performance make this is a very desirable laptop that also does a decent turn as a tablet too.
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