Gadgetory

hi I'm Nate rocket Cena and today we're checking out the asus vivobook s 451 la which is kind of a mouthful so this seven hundred dollar 14-inch laptop is about an inch thick so it's pretty thin but it weighs five pounds so it's not exactly an ultra portable machine but you know what it looks it looks pretty uh it's got a brushed metal lid and a metal body and a plastic base so at a blush at first blush it looks like a really you know like a premium machine but then you open it up now it's a seven hundred dollar machine so we aren't too surprised by the 1366 x 768 resolution still that's kind of disappointing that said it is a touchscreen and it's a nice responsive touch screens do which is you know that that's pretty good especially on windows 8 if you like touching Windows 8 you know you won't be too disappointed by this touch screen let's talk about the keyboard and trackpad though um now because it's again because it's a 14 inch machine you've got a lot of space the keyboard and the trackpad they're both nice and wide and spacious that's good unfortunately the trackpad isn't super accurate there are a lot of gestures baked in to sort of you know get you a little more familiar with windows 8 things like swiping in from the left to switch between apps and things like that but it isn't too accurate you know as I as I try to track around it doesn't always catch my gestures and that can be kind of annoying the keyboard isn't backlight again for a seven hundred dollar machine we don't necessarily expect a backlit keyboard but that's still pretty disappointing now inside we've got a fourth-generation core i5 processor six gigs of ram and a 500 gig hard drive let's decent but it's a 500 gig spinning platter hard drive now if it were an SSD that'd be phenomenal I would have settled for a hybrid drive at this point but but that slower drive is going to affect your performance a bit the rest of the specs though you know again they're not bad at seven hundred dollars it's not a bad price and it's not a terrible machine but you can do better if you spend a little bit more you could get machines that are either slightly bigger offer a better resolution or maybe even a discrete graphics card this machine offers intel integrated graphics which has gotten better admittedly but it's not gonna be good if you want to get very much gaming done or anything like that or even photo editing now I personally believe that windows 8 on a notebook is greatly helped by a touchscreen but if you don't agree then 700 bucks is actually kind of a steep price for what you're getting here I'm Nate Ralph and be sure to read the full review on the asus vivobook s 451 la again with a mouthful read the full review on cnet com thanks for watching