Asus quietly started adding a series of new entry-level 11.6 inch laptops to its website in January. Now it looks like at least some of these laptops are available for purchase in the United States.
The Asus VivoBook E200HA is a Windows notebook with an 11.6 inch display, an Intel Atom x5-Z8300 Cherry Trail processor. It’s available from the Asus Store for $199.
Like a lot of notebooks in the small-and-cheap category, the VivoBook E200HA has just 2GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage. But the laptop does have a few features that could make it more attractive than the Asus EeeBook X205TA that the company launched in 2014.
For example, the new model has 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.1, and a USB 3.0 port (as well as a USB 2.0 port).
Other features include a microSD card reader and micro HDMI output, a 1366 x 768 pixel display, a digital array microphone, a VGA webcam, and a headset jack.
The laptop has a 38 Wh battery that Asus says should be good for up to 14 hours of run time (which seems unlikely, but not altogether impossible if you disable WiFi and use the laptop just to watch videos). The VivoBook E200HA measures about 0.7 inches thick and weighs 2.2 pounds.
thanks JasonAlec!
Probably a TN panel.
You may be surprised…IPS screens have been showing up on $99 tablets. I’d actually be surprised if this wasn’t an IPS display.
Edit: Oops, nevermind, answered on the wrong thread. This is probably a TN panel. Disregard what I said above.
IPS vs TN isn’t as simple as it seems. The TN panel on my Asus C201 chromebook is just as good as the IPS panel on my new Acer Chromebook 11 (admitted a lower price point IPS display),
Asus makes pretty decent glossy TN panels on their lower-end devices. Both the Asus X205TA (Windows 8.1) and C201 (Chromebook) have reasonably bright and crisp displays, whereas their counterparts from Acer, Lenovo, HP, and others at the sub-$200 price point typically have had dim, matte displays. I’m excited to see how this device performs. For the money I think Asus makes the best budget-friendly devices.
Why is no one using Atom x7 ? ( except for Surface 3 & weird Chinese brands that have sub 10 hr battery life ).
TDP of x3 and x7 is the same, with a noticeable difference in performance !
Is it the heat?
‘x3-Z8300’ above is a typo – it’s an Atom x5-Z8300
I have a similar 11.6″ Atom x5-Z8300 unit with IPS FHD (1920×1080) from one of those ‘weird Chinese brands’ = ~$275 from GearBest.com (battery life in my experience ~7 hours)
http://en.myvoyo.com/chanpin/p…
The market sweet spot for these things (even by Intel’s own reckoning) is ~$300 to $350 max – above that you’re starting to get into Core m and Celeron/Pentium territory. Bumping the above to an Atom x7 probably blows the cost/price even for those ‘weird Chinese brands’ (let alone Asus/Dell/Acer/etc) past what they think the majority of the market is willing to spend.
My .02 anyway…
How are you finding the Voyo book? They look like solid machines for their price
As one would expect, fit/finish and overall quality of hardware seems as good as any Asus/Dell/Lenovo/etc I’ve seen lately. I’ve had to fiddle about with Win10 a bit to get rid of the Chinese language artifacts in the UI but no biggie. I haven’t looked at the BIOS. The only concern would be technical support – what little support there is on the website is mostly in Chinese and there is no ‘Genius Bar’ at my local Voyo store, of course. Nor do I expect any driver updates, etc from Voyo in the future. If you’re a reasonably experienced/resourceful PC geek/troubleshooter (in the event of a problem) like me and probably most folks haunting this website, probably an okay risk. I personally haven’t experienced any issues with my Voyo but I’ve read comments from some who have had problems with their Voyo, Onda, and similar ‘weird Chinese brands’ – seems… Read more »
Not much difference in price my friend. But i guess i can undertand them trying to make as much profit.
z8300 is $19 and z8500 is $23 and z8700 is $30 in CAD$.
http://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/c…
http://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/c…
A ca. $12 (currently $9 US) difference on a component in something with a BOM of likely somewhere between $150 to $180 US (in the case of my Voyo unit) isn’t insignificant, my friend. That component cost differential gets rolled through the profit margins of both the manufacturer and the retail channel – plus there’s probably some intrinsic increased market value for a unit with the faster CPU. It’s not just a simple matter of adding the ca. $12 to the price the end-consumer pays.
How much would you be willing to pay for one of these units with an Atom x7? Are you willing to settle for a cheap 1366×768 TN panel to get more battery life? Manufacturers may not be inclined to put a non-premium display in a unit with a ‘premium’ x7 CPU.
I would definately pay 500USD for a x7 with 12inch 1080p display, 2 in 1 form factor and 12hr plus battery.
Basically a larger surface 3.
I think the closest i can get to what i want is lenovo x1 tablet thas comin out soon, its got core m but i care about a long battery life with the module in a tablet / 2 in 1 form factor.
Ya well – good luck… a ThinkPad X1 with the extra battery module will set you back over $1000. Even for a Cherry Trail device tough to fit all that battery into such a small space at your desired price point (11.6″ isn’t all that much more than 10.8″ Surface 3) Intel’s original design targets for the Atom x5/x7 were up to 10.1″ 2-in-1s – moving beyond 12″ like the X1 may be stretching beyond the limit.
Well, Surface 3 starts at around $500US so I’d recommend going that route then…unless there’s something about the surface 3 you really don’t like…
Well, if we’re talking wish lists… 😉 Call me wierd, but I’d pay $300 to $350 for a laptop with a 12.5″-13.3″ IPS display with between a 900p and 1080p resolution and an x7 processor, 4GB of memory (expandability a plus) and a real SSD (2.5″ or m.2 or msata) unlocked bios with CSM support. (I’m willing to negotiate on the display specs though)
If they make it thin and light and put a lot of brushed metal on it, I could be persuaded to go up to $400….if they make it a 2-in-1 (or maybe convertible, though I’m not crazy about that form factor) with those specs and they throw in a well integrated Wacom digitizer and pen, I’m willing to go up to $450-500…
This is all assuming they have some sort of support channel in the western world. If it’s some fly-by-night Shenzhen company, no deal. 😉
I’m sure a lot of people would. Unfortunately, any vendor selling stuff at those prices wouldn’t be around long enough to support it.
But it is an election year here in the US… maybe you could get the folks in Washington to borrow some more $ from China to fund an ‘ObamaPC’ subsidy in exchange for your vote.
Haha!, I would, but I’m not a member of the electoral college so my vote doesn’t mean anything. 🙂
So, which segment did you think was most unrealistic? I thought the last segment for $450-$500 was the most realistic, basically a Surface 3 with a bigger, lower resolution screen.
Well, I suspect Intel frowns on anything over 12″ based on Atom SoC – that’s Celeron/Pentium/Core m territory by their reckoning. For that reason alone the major brands might be reluctant to do a bigger Surface 3 – even if they could meet your desired price point with acceptable margin. The ‘weird Chinese brands’ might be able to meet your price but I haven’t seen any play in the beyond 12″ space yet.
I don’t think it’s so much the profit, but the added cost, both engineering and BOM, to design and make 2-in-1s and convertibles. I haven’t seen many standalone laptops and tablets announced in a while.
Ya i think the 2 in 1 design could be expensive to manufacture.
I think thats the problem. There are couple of things at play here. 1. Not many ppl are interested in power sipping entry level laptops anymore 2. And consequently, less competition and ingenuity and sales to justify any significant company resources.
Like acer has almost stopped in this field to focus on smartphones.
I disagree with some of your points. People are looking for a balance of power, efficiency, weight and form factor. Right now, at least in Europe, the 2-in-1 form factor is doing well. I don’t understand why you think there is less competition and ingenuity in this field, for every Acer that leaves, there are a dozen Shenzhen OEMs jumping in. As for ingenuity itself. We’ve hit the easy design limit on the form factor. Any further design innovations are going to be in the combination of features due to BOM
did they screw the uefi again? can we install linux finaly
yes and no. Yes, you can put linux easily, I have even secure boot on EFI working like a charm. No, there are problems ASUS won’t care solving, like the audio driver which doesn’t exist even on kernel 4.6, the touchpad which is recognized as mouse and won’t recognize gestures or even scrolling, and the sd card is also not recognized at all so the idea to simply stick in a micro sd with 32/64/128GB and mount it at boot time to have the best of all worlds won’t work.
thank you for the answer!
I’ve given up with linux on this device, and am just about to take it back. Running `ag -lu xyzzy /` as root will kernel reboot the laptop *every time*.
See also https://wiki.debian.org/Instal… and
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux… for more details of issues you’ll face with this model.
They must be making money on these things. Given the huge discounts that the X205TA sometimes sold for that seem hard to believe.
These Atom-powered 11.6 inch notebooks have flooded the market. I’m curious which one is the “best” as I am in the market for one for my daughter….
Most of then have been the atom Celeron types.I got the hp stream and the build quality is similar to my dell latitude and it came with office 365 which is a big bonus.the cheaper$150 offerings like asus and dell inspiron11 don’t usually come with that, so the office subscription is something to look putt for in my opinion
I’m confused about this Atom chips how does the text the Cherry Trail X5 compare to the Celoron 2850 or Celeron 3050
The Atom is essentially a phone/tablet processor that can be used in a laptop while the Celeron is Intel’s low-end laptop processor. The Celeron supports up to 8GB of RAM; the Atom is limited to 2. The Atom has 4 cores and the Celeron 2. The Celeron has a higher maximum clock speed. The Atom has incredibly low power usage — 2W, compared to a still very low 4.5 for the Celeron. The Celeron supports using multiple displays, the Atom does not. The Atom has significantly better PassMark benchmarks, but I suspect that in real life they’ll give you broadly similar performance, though the Celeron paired with 8GB of RAM would probably outperform the Atom with 2GB in most tasks, especially when using Windows.
Thanks for that.so what do you think is preferable, an atom powered laptop like this Vivopad or a Celeron like dell inspiring 11 or go stream 11. It sounds like this asus gets better battery life which is consistent with what you said about atom using less power
The N3050 dual-core Celeron is a pretty terrible processor in my experience. I don’t recommend any Windows PC the that that processor, they are brutally slow. The x5-z8300 and -8500 are quad-core processors and are preferably to those dual-core Celerons.
It doesn’t help that there’s no Hyper Threading support in modern ATOMs so multi-threaded processing is limited to the number of cores…
Though, keep in mind that even with a quad core that depending on factors like cooling, processor class, etc. that the max clock may only be available for one to two cores but running all four cores may require it to run at a lower clock to prevent overheating and/or drawing too much power…
While Cherry Trails tend to run noticeable hotter than the previous Bay Trails as the trade off for the much better GPU performance. So can run into more throttling issues…
Intel’s published specifications evidently say these Atom SoC’s RAM is limited to 2GB – but at least some vendors are installing 4GB. Per my comment further below, I have a similar 11.6″ Atom x5-Z8300 unit with IPS FHD (1920×1080), 4GB RAM, and 64GB eMMC = ~$275 from GearBest.com (currently ~$250 in orange or black)
http://en.myvoyo.com/chanpin/p…
4GB RAM reports and runs fine…
Yah, like the other guys say, avoid the X5-Z8300 based systems. I’d recommend a minimum of X5-Z8500 or X7-Z8700. The Celeron and Pentium versions of these Atoms are not that much better either (just uses more power and stays at higher clock rates longer). You might be better off getting a laptop based on the big-core Broadwell and Skylake based celerons and pentiums if power is more important than battery life.
Uh, you’re misrepresenting the comparison… The ATOM is a range of processors that support phone to laptop range devices, but this includes Celerons/Pentiums! All Braswell and Bay Trail based Celerons/Pentiums are ATOMs too! The actual distinction is that the Celeron/Pentium range are Intel’s budget processors, primarily intended for low cost laptops or cheap servers but can be based on either Core or ATOM architecture… The Celeron/Pentium range just means they aren’t as optimized for mobile usage and operate at higher TDP than the mobile optimized models… While mobile ATOMs are usually limited to mobile parts like eMMC, LP-DDR3 RAM, etc. Only the x5-Z8300 is even indicated to have a 2GB limit but it can actually support up to 4GB, as shown by other devices that have already been configured with 4GB and the system have been shown to fully recognize and use that RAM… The higher end ATOMs can even… Read more »
Do computers with cherry trail come with free office 365 the way that Celerons 3050 computers do. If they don’t that would seem to be a reason why you should buy a Celeron instead of a cherry trail computer
Whatever happened to the Eeebook E202 series announced 9 months ago? Or the E403SA? Did Asus cancel all those lines?
http://liliputing.com/2015/06/…
Will be interesting to see how it handles gaming, seeing as other 14nm netbooks have suffered from heat/throttling issues when the GPU is pushed hard enough.
It runs the Windows 10 version of Minecraft at a solid 40fps, but it probably won’t do well with more hardcore gaming. Steam in-home streaming, here we come.
” VivoBook E200HA has just 2GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage.”
I’ll bet the other “features” that will ruin your day are: 64-bit Windows support ONLY, NO way for the user to upgrade the tiny 2GB SDRAM, and a Linux hostile UEFI.
yes and no. Yes, you can put linux easily, I have even secure boot on EFI working like a charm ( running archibold.io right now ) . No, there are problems ASUS won’t care solving, like the audio driver which doesn’t exist even on kernel 4.6, the touchpad which is recognized as mouse and won’t recognize gestures or even scrolling, and the sd card is also not recognized at all so the idea to simply stick in a micro sd with 32/64/128GB and mount it at boot time to have the best of all worlds won’t work. The GNOME 3.20 on ArchLinux goes twice as fast than Windows 10 … yet I’ve no idea why ASUS never cared about Linux … what an epic fail, this could have been the best entry-level laptop of all times.