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The Asus VivoBook X202 is a thin and light laptop designed to run Windows 8. It’s not exactly an ultrabook — since it’s a hair too thick to qualify, and since it doesn’t have solid state storage. But this 2.9 pound notebook is also cheaper than most ultrabooks, with a starting price of $599.

The VivoBook X202 goes on sale October 26th, but you can pre-order one from Amazon starting today.

Equipped with an 11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel touchscreen display, the laptop has a 1.8 GHz Intel Core i3-3217U Ivy Bridge CPU, 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard disk. It has 2 USB 2.0 ports, 1 USB 3.0 port, and Intel GMA 4000 graphics.

The laptop features 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, a VGA webcam, and a flash card reader. Asus says the X202 should get up to 5 hours of battery life.

The Asus VivoBook X202 laptop measures 11.9″ x 7.9″ x 0.8, which makes it about 0.1 inches thicker than a typical 11.6 inch ultrabook — but I doubt you’d notice much difference.

So far the VivoBook X202 is the least expensive Windows 8 laptop Asus has announced, but with a $599 price tag, it costs about twice as much as the company’s Windows 7 Eee PC netbooks.