We are slowly seeing Ǫualcomm-fitted Windows machines with Copilot+ feature in the market, with ASUS being among the first to bring it to the Indian shores. The new ASUS Vivobook S 15 OLED (S5507) is an ARM-based Windows 11 laptop that’s priced at Rs. 1,24,990 and aims to be your one-stop work machine. Does it really fare well against the current competition from Intel and AMD, let’s try and see:
The Vivobook S15 OLED is an all-metal magnesium alloy laptop with a small hinge that goes 180 degrees for the display to become parallel to the ground. The lid outside has the ASUS Vivobook branding, the bottom has the vents and a rubberized column for feet. The left side carries an HDMI 2.1 port, two USB type C ports (can run a 4k display), a microSD card slot, and a 3.5mm audio jack. The right-side houses two USB 3.2 gen 1 type A ports and battery indicator LED and processing indicator LED.
The trackpad is area is decent for basic Windows gestures and it’s plenty large in size while the single- zone RGB backlit chiclet keyboard is comfortable to type on with decent travel for keys, though it’s slightly noisy. This is a slim and relatively lightweight laptop that is comfortable to carry around if the 15-6inch (16:9 aspect ratio) size is your preference.
Coming to the 15.6-inch (2880x1620) OLED display, this is a really nice panel that scores well on the sharpness and colour calibration. It does a good job of handling various video highlights and supports up to 120Hz refresh rates. Its HDR output is also quite good, keeping in check shadow-y scenes and colour contrast with sufficient brightness in place.
Coming to the main talking point, the laptop is equipped with Ǫualcomm’s Snapdragon Elite X chip (up to 3.4Ghz 12-core processor, Adreno E7800 GPU and Hexagon 45 TOPS NPU) along with 16GB LPDDR5X RAM (that’s not upgradable) and 1 TB PCIe NVMe m.2 internal SSD. It’s good to see the laptop handle Microsoft’s Office apps, browsers like Edge, Firefox, multimedia apps like PotPlayer and even editing apps like Lightroom and Photoshop without any performance issues.
It would be safe to say popular apps with their ARM variants aren’t any bottlenecks here and you’re good to go if that’s what you use a big majority of the times. It can have a bit of an issue in plaing a
4k video in a multimedia player (the display doesn’t support 4K, but still), plus you might want to check your current accessories, which may or may not work considering this isn’t an Intel or AMD based system.
During my usage, I also noticed there’s no heating issues and the laptop remain relatively fine when it comes to body temperatures while
running multiple tasks at once. The one clear downside of this laptop is gaming – it’s just not close to its Intel, AMD and Nvidia competitors yet. So, games like Diablo or Overwatch would barely work and some other popular ones might not even load. ASUS has added Copilot+ for AI in the laptop. So, you get live captions, which worked for translating into English and Mandarin only for now; then you have Cocreator that gives artwork if you feed your sketches to it. There are also creator-related features under Windows Studio Effects to get better video in low-light, or creative filters (including animated and watercolour), as well as denoising.
Moving to the battery life, I found the 70WHr battery to last me a full working day quite frequently – over 12 hours with screen brightness at around 50%, and 1%-2% loss when left on sleep mode overnight. This is definitely one of the strengths of this laptop and it isn’t surprising to see considering the chip used here. ASUS provides a 90watts USB type C charger in the box that can charge the laptop from 1% to full in around 2 hours.
The speakers on this laptop are good and loud enough for watching videos and playing games with if you’re indoors and it’s not noisy around you. The 1080p webcam with a physical shutter is decent for video calls and so are the mics for any calls.
In a nutshell, ASUS’s first Ǫualcomm-powered attempt seems like a solid try – great battery life, quality display in place along with reliable performance for most work related apps. Gaming and maybe even third party accessories are two areas where they the platform can certainly keep improving, but if you’re looking for a work laptop and need smooth Web browsing, Office apps and no issues when resuming your machine from sleep mode, the Vivobook S 15 is surely worth your consideration.
