The new Asus Transformer Book Flip TP200SA is a low cost little laptop designed for portability and battery life. But it’s got a host of features typically only found on much higher end laptops.
Not even the new Surface Book has USB Type-C, but here it is on a little affordable ASUS laptop. Even better, it’s USB 3.1 spec – ASUS claim it will transfer a 2GB movie to a USB drive in under 2 seconds.
The Flip also has a special hinge that lets the screen lay all the way back so it can be used as a tablet. Thanks to Windows 10, it will likely be a pretty good experience too.
Unlike some of its plastic brethren, the Flip is clad in metal and looks quite premium. It’s only 18.45mm thick and weighs in at 1.2 KG.
The laptop is bundled with a one year Office 365 subscription, as well as a free 32GB microSD card.
So what hardware is actually inside?
Not surprisingly for the price, it is pretty low end. The Flip has a Dual Core Celeron N3050 CPU coupled to 2GB of RAM. The 14nm processor was launched at the start of the year and can boost up to 2.16 GHz.
We don’t see any vents on the Flip, so with the low power CPU, hopefully it is totally fanless.
The screen is a 11.6”l, with a resolution of 1366 x 768. Of course higher would be nicer, but it’s enough for a small low cost machine. More importantly, it is an IPS panel, so hopefully the quality and viewing angles are good.
The screen is overlaid with a 10 point multi touchscreen
The laptop has a 32GB or 64GB eMMC SSD – though the $498 model from JB-HiFi has the 32GB version.
ASUS promise up to 8 hours of battery life from the 38Wh battery, and the whole thing only weighs 1.2 KG.
It has a decent array of connectivity – with a standard USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 port, plus the USB 3.1 Type-C. You also get Micro HDMI, a microSD card reader and a 3.5mm headset jack.
The laptop also includes 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1 and a webcam.
It remains to be seen how good the Flip is in personal, but the even lower cost ASUS Eeebook X205TA to be an excellent little laptop.
We have requested a review unit, so keep an eye out for a hands on soon.