Asus Vivobook S 15 OLED (with Snapdragon X Elite) review

Asus has always had a knack for creating laptops with functional sensibilities, and the Vivobook S 15 OLED doesn't disappoint. You get two USB4 ports supporting up to 40 Gbps data transfer, DisplayPort, and Power Delivery. There's also a full-sized HDMI 2.1 port, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, a microSD card reader, and an audio combo jack. Wireless connectivity is future-proofed with Wi-Fi 7 support, promising theoretical speeds of up to 5.8 Gbps. It’s so much better than whatever Dell XPS and MacBooks are doing with their measly port selection.

Everything is made from lightweight aluminium alloy, this 15.6-inch laptop measures just 14.7 mm at its thinnest point and weighs a mere 1.42 kg. It's the kind of device you can easily slip into your bag and forget it's there. It’s got two fans and two exhaust vents which keeps the already cool-running laptop cooler when the tasks demand a bit more grunt.

The star of the show here is undoubtedly the 15.6-inch OLED display. ASUS has gone all out with a 3K (2880 x 1620) panel boasting a 120Hz refresh rate. The screen covers 100% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut and is Vesa DisplayHDR True Black 600 certified.

The specs are undeniably impressive and it can dish out excellent picture quality even at lower brightness levels. Games and Netflix look superb with crisp image quality and high brightness. Everything stays vibrant and punchy. Although, the screen is made from plastic so we’re not sure how it's going to keep scratches away in the long run.

A great display marred by poor audio quality for entertainment. The Vivobook speakers are facing down and they get muffled easily. The mic too makes your voice sound too distant and tinny. So for conference calls or Netflix, it’s best to use a pair of headphones.

Speaking of which, there’s a physical camera shutter on the webcam which is a fantastic addition and a great indicator of this laptop’s target audience.

The heart of the Vivobook S 15 OLED is Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite platform. This marks a significant departure from the Intel and AMD processors typically found in Windows laptops. The Snapdragon X Elite features a 12-core Qualcomm Oryon CPU built on a 4nm process, promising high performance with low power consumption. While the benchmark scores come out in favour of the Qualcomm chip compared to the Apple MacBooks with M2 or even M3 processors, how does it truly perform in everyday tasks?

We can say for certain that the Snapdragon X Elite is a battery marathoner. Asus claims around 18 hours and we got around 12 to 14 hours in our use. Albeit, we were not able to fully use all our apps on this Windows machine like we do on the Apple MacBooks. Adobe’s InDesign app which we use for print work does not support ARM laptops just yet. Photoshop and Premiere Pro work well but you may want to check if your apps are compatible with this laptop before you open your wallet. 

Writing, browsing and using Microsoft Office apps was perfect. There were no hiccups in everyday office use and the Asus Vivobook S 15 would wake up and go to sleep like a smartphone. Charging it regularly is not required unless you edit photos and videos a lot. The battery drain in sleep mode is nearly absent which means the Vivobook S 15 can match the Apple MacBook in performance and battery life thanks to the Qualcomm chip. It does heat up a bit in demanding tasks and if you cover the vents while working on your lap or pillow, you will feel a bit of heat.

The Asus also seriously undercuts the ₹1,54,990 Apple MacBook Air 15 inch in terms of price and storage options. You get up to 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. Booting up anything from the Steam library is a hit-and-miss. Sifu and Dave the Diver work well but many games outright refuse to start.

Microsoft’s relentless marketing on Co-Pilot + PC is a lot like the metaverse gobbledegook that brands tried to market during Covid. Nevertheless, the Snapdragon X Elite platform includes Qualcomm's AI Engine with a built-in Hexagon NPU (Neural Processing Unit) capable of up to 45 TOPS (Trillion Operations Per Second) of AI computing performance. While that’s a great number on the spec sheet, the actual use case is either extremely limited or absent at best.

For this particular Asus Vivobook features like the Asus AiSense camera use AI for noise reduction in low-light conditions, improving video call quality. There's also Asus StoryCube, an AI-powered photo and video management tool that can automatically categorize and tag your media files. Meanwhile, Windows Studio Effects uses AI to enhance video calls with background blur, eye contact correction, and automatic framing.

The heavily marketed Co-Pilot is rather dull. It doesn’t work across the Windows UI to navigate and bring things from the deep trenches of the Download folder, emails and calendar. It doesn’t work without the internet either, and at its core, it’s still a chatbot which has a conversation limit. So after a good back and forth, the Co-Pilot chat will prompt you to click ‘New Topic’ and everything you’ve discussed up until that point will be lost and forgotten by the AI. So the Co-Pilot chatbot never ends up being personal or tailored. As a writer, I cannot teach it to write like me to speed up my work process nor can I ask it to fetch an Uber receipt from the Outlook inbox. It doesn’t work in tandem with Photoshop either so whatever ancient AI algorithm Adobe uses will always be the case for Generative Fill on Photoshop and other Adobe apps.

Co-Pilot is severely hamstrung by Windows’ inability to quickly adopt AI into its OS. In comparison Google’s Gemini on Pixel devices is a far more mature integration of AI and Apple’s upcoming iPhone launch will reveal something similar but across the iPhone, Macs, iPads and Apple Watch.

Even for early adopters the Asus Vivobook S 15 OLED doesn’t bring the AI revolution that Windows’ marketing plan promises. The laptop itself is fantastic with excellent I/O support, a fantastic OLED display and a phenomenal battery life that is only beaten marginally by the MacBook Air M2. In terms of performance, the laptop has the horsepower on benchmarks but in real-life use, the absence of certain apps might irk some and Window’s ARM implementation is still buggy. Apps don’t scale properly after turning on from a sleep state and the Dell XPS Qualcomm laptop we have would not recognise the fingerprint scanner after sleep state. 

So there are some things to iron out but finally, Windows has a working ARM-based laptop and we couldn’t be more excited. Firstly, for office work and Microsoft Office gymnastics, the Vivobook S is thoroughly capable and a battery monster. Browsing, writing, editing photos and more is great without a hit on battery life.

We still think the MacBook Air is a better laptop but at ₹1,24,990, the Vivobook S 15 OLED undercuts the Mac in terms of storage options and RAM. Both of these are very important in the long run and if your use is only office work, then the Vivobook is a great option to have.