Thursday 31 March 2016

Asus Transformer Book Flip TP200SA

Asus Transformer Book Flip TP200SA

A notebook/tablet that’s ‘flipping’ good

The 12" touchscreen laptop market is quite a busy place to get into these days. The likes of HP, Lenovo, Toshiba, Acer and Dell are all there, with each company pitching its own particular brand.

Asus, therefore, has to come up with something special to compete and make its mark. Well, it may have done so with the Transformer Book Flip TP200SA.


Powered by a 1.6GHz Intel Celeron N3050 processor (2.16GHz turbo burst clock speed), the Flip TP200SA comes with 2GB of DDR3L 1600MHz memory and 32GB of eMMC flash storage and Windows 10 64-bit Home Edition.

Connectivity is good for a notebook of this size, with one USB 3.0 port, one USB 2.0 port, one USB 3.1 Type-C Gen1, a micro-SD card reader, micro HDMI, 802.11ac wireless and Bluetooth 4.1. It’s a decent, and welcome, amount to pile into a notebook that measures only 297 x 201 x 18.4mm.

The design of the Flip TP200SA is good too. The sleek-looking metallic chassis and keyboard section is certainly very stylish, but it’s also solid and doesn’t flex when manhandled. The bottom of the notebook is black plastic, which gives it a slightly cheaper feel, but it keeps the weight down, and it’s sturdy enough.

With the battery the Flip TP200SA weighs 1.2kg. That’s not a bad weight to have to carry around with you, but as the name of the notebook suggests, the Flip’s screen can open 360º to become a tablet. When in tablet mode, 1.2kg isn’t too heavy, and due to its dimensions, it’s quite slim as well. After a while of holding it, though, especially in one hand, it’ll prove much heavier than a dedicated tablet.

The engineering, however, with regards to the flip movement, is excellent. There’s a long hinge section taking up most of the joint between the keyboard and the screen elements, which makes for a solid ‘feel’ when turning it to and from notebook and tablet modes. It’s far better than some doublehinge models we’ve used in the
past, at least.

The performance of the Flip is good. Windows 10 works well with the touchpad gestures, proving responsive and useful. The extra speed from the processor does a good job of keeping up with the usual office-based tasks and even a spot of (very) lightweight gaming from the Windows Store. As long as you don’t expect too much from the Flip, it’ll work with you quite happily.

As for the battery, we managed a tad over six and a half hours of normal use (browsing, using a word processor, listening to music, etc.), before we needed to plug it back in again. All this was while the screen was at full brightness levels too, so it’s more than enough to last the average commute.

Priced at around £250, the Asus Transformer Book Flip TP200SA is a good choice of modern notebook/tablet. It has enough performance for most users, looks good and is well constructed, and it's capable of lasting most of the working day off a full charge. David Hayward

A great notepad/tablet that works well.