ASUS has been among the most popular brands in the PC space, especially the laptop side, when it comes to the Indian market for a while now. The Zenbook has been doing fine in the higher end segment, and the Vivobook has come a long way in terms of hardware improvements and tweaks since it first launched years back. Now, there’s the new Vivobook S 14 OLED (M5406) launched at a base price of Rs 89,999.
The laptop is made of aluminium alloy with the hinge going back as much as 180 degrees. The hinge, though, is quite small and not very noticeable, giving it a bit of neat look, one can say. The 16:10 14-inch display has narrow bezels around it and sports a webcam with physical shutter on it. The left side features HDMI 2.1, two thunderbolt USB 3.2 type C ports, microSD card slot and 3.5mm audio jack; while the right side carries two USB 3.2 type A ports along with two little LEDs for charging and processing status. The vents sit at the back and plus at the bottom along with the Harman-Kardon speakers.
The trackpad has now been increased in length and breadth, making it one of the bigger ones on a consumer laptop now. It has a metallic plate and feels nice and premium to use. During my usage, I found it to be tracking gestures for Windows and taps for clicks reliably for day-to-day use. The keys on the keyboard are single-source LED backlit and have decent travel to them. These keys produce lower click-ity sound volume than what usually laptops have at this price range, which a lot of people who work in quiet environments might like. Oh, and the keyboard has a Copilot key (in place of the right Control key) to bring up Copilot whenever and wherever you want to (no additional subscription provided). I am not exactly a fan of having it but then I didn’t really need to use Copilot frequently, either, yet. The keyboard’s RGB lighting can be customized via Windows’ Dynamic Ligthing settings in place, and it works nicely.
The 14-inch WUXGA (1,920x1,220) Lumina OLED display is a quality panel used by ASUS here. It’s bright, has good viewing angles at most angles, is a bit glossy, and produces sharp output for high resolution images and videos, too. Though it’s usable when outdoors during day, it’s not the best performer in these conditions for working. HDR output is also pretty good in terms of details and handling low-light scenes without sacrificing on colours and contrast with it.
The laptop packs in Ryzen’s 5 series chip (6-core 7535HS clocked at up to with turbo boost at up to 4.8GHz) and AMD Radeon graphics, along with 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 1TB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe m.2 SSD. It runs on Windows 11 Home OS (23H2 version). You can also get it in 8GB + 512GB configuration. The machine is capable of handling tasks such as running Office apps, multiple Edge and Firefox tabs, music playing in the background plus a file downloading in the background – I didn’t really see any major issues here. ASUS also seems to have made the sleep to wake up time a little less, or should I say not buggy, which we had seen several previous models, including Vivobook models. For gaming, though, there’s clearly a ceiling, as you can play a game like Fortnite and low to medium settings at under 60FPS and don’t expect get any further performance enhancements with other graphic-intensive games. Having said that, this isn’t meant to be your gaming centre, so it’s expected. The one weird thing I noticed, not sure if it’s intentional, is that the processing status LED stayed on instead of blinking or going off when the laptop was in sleep mode.
The built-in Harman-Kardon speakers are quite loud and clear sounding for a laptop and can be used for watching videos or event movies or series when you’re indoors with not a lot of chatter around. The Vivobook S 14 OLED sports a 75watt hour battery unit and can be charged from 1 per cent to full using the bundled 65 watts fast charger in about 2.5 hours or so. The laptop lasted me 7.5-8 hours on the go, which is acceptable and nothing outstanding for a work machine.
All in all, the Vivobook S 14 OLED is a well-built Windows 11 machine that can handle pretty much all your day-to-day tasks without any major barriers and that display and keyboard in place only make the experience better. It has decent battery life with little to medium gaming capabilities, which is what’s otherwise a good work laptop.