LAPTOP | £1,200 from Asus www.snipca.com/50230 Asus Vivobook S 16 OLED
Reviews
Sweet sixteen
Our current favourite laptop, the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus (£899 from Dell at www. snipca.com/50079, reviewed in Issue 683), has an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor and a 14in screen. If you want to ‘upsize’ your screen you’ll need to pay a bit more – and the Vivobook S 16 OLED would be a good choice. It has the same 16-core processor, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, but offers a larger 16in OLED screen.
Paying £300 more, you get a sturdier chassis made entirely from metal. There’s a slight flex to the lid if you put a lot of pressure on it, but its otherwise solid. It’s larger overall than the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus, measuring 15.9x354x247mm (HxWxD), thanks to its bigger screen, but it’s actually slimmer when folded up.
Nor does Asus skimp on ports, with an HDMI socket, microSD card slot, 3.5mm headphone jack and two USB-C ports on the left, while two USB 3.0 ports sit on the right (all pictured below). Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.4 complete the generous connectivity options. Even the 1080p webcam is top quality.
One key benefit of a laptop at this size is the space to include a number pad, which is handy if you’re regularly entering numbers into spreadsheets. However, it does mean a couple of compromises on its layout, with a small single-height Enter key (some straddle two rows to make them easier to hit) and the trackpad is shuffled slightly to the left of centre.
There are no such trade-offs with the 3200x2000-pixel resolution OLED screen, though. Its colour accuracy is seriously impressive, managing 99 per cent of the DCI-P3 standard in our tests. In terms of refresh rate, you can set Windows to run it at 60Hz, 120Hz or let it decide depending on which software you’re using.
At lower brightness levels the screen’s whites aren’t as crisp as we’d like, but pushing this to its 387cd/m2 peak solved that problem. It’s a ple
