Asus VivoBook E200HA 11.6 inch Cherry Trail notebook now available for $199

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.

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…

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

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.

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 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.

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…

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.

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 »

thank you for the answer!

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 »

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

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.

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…

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…