Asus X200MA review

Stuart Andrews April 2, 2015

£199

Price when reviewed

Asus, one of the masters of the low-cost laptop, is attempting to strike again with the Asus X200MA. While more expensive than its stablemate which we reviewed recently, the EeeBook X205TA, the extra £20 spent on the Asus X200MA seems well worth it. It gets you a stronger specification and more local storage, albeit at the expense of portability and battery life.

Asus X200MA review: design

Our review sample arrived in a rather business-like black, but you can also find the X200MA in snazzy red, blue and white finishes. There’s a little flair in the dimpled texture on the keyboard surround and the lid, and the curvy, wedge-like profile leaves the hands in a good typing position. You can see signs of the X200MA’s price in the lightweight plastics, particularly underneath, but it still feels noticeably tougher than the EeeBook.

asus-x200ma-front

On the downside, it’s also noticeably larger: 16mm wider, 7mm deeper and over 25mm thick at the rear of the machine. That translates to a weight of 1.24kg – still light, but not as ultra-light as the X205TA.

Asus X200MA review: connectivity and display

Connectivity is better, too. You’ll find VGA and full-sized HDMI video outputs on the left-hand side, along with a USB 3 port, while two USB 2 ports and an SD card slot sit on the right-hand side. Asus has also squeezed in an Ethernet port with an ingenious expanding opening, although it only supports the 10/100 standard.

The display is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, the X200MA does a better job of handling darker tones than the EeeBook or the Acer Aspire ES1-111M, and its 492:1 contrast is pretty good. On the other, it’s brightness levels max out at a relatively dim 200cd/m². In practice, we didn’t find this a problem indoors, where it’s crisp, with lifelike colours, but in brighter conditions the screen soon washes out.

Audio is comparatively good, with Asus’s SonicMaster Speakers putting out a sound with richer tone, better clarity and more stereo width than the competition. It’s too brash, bass-light and mid-range heavy for any serious entertainment, though.

Asus scores points for the touchpad, which, at 104 x 60mm, is big for an 11.6in laptop. It’s responsive, too. Asus loses some marks for the keyboard, which spoils a sensible layout and good-sized keys with a very light, shallow action that makes it hard to tell if you’ve hit a key or not.

Asus X200MA review: performance and battery life

The EeeBook impressed us with its battery life, but the X200MA’s non-removable, three-cell, 3,300mAh lithium-ion battery doesn’t hold up. It sputtered out short of six hours in our light-use test, and lasted less than five hours in our more demanding heavy-use battery test.

Whereas the EeeBook was let down by its Bay Trail-T Atom processor, the X200MA uses a faster Celeron N2830. Architecturally, they’re both based on Intel’s Silvermont micro-architecture, but the EeeBook’s quad-core Atom Z3735F is limited to 1.33Ghz, hitting 1.83Ghz in burst mode; the dual-core Celeron N2830 starts at 2.16GHz and can go up to 2.41GHz.

Unfortunately for Asus, its competitors are using the dual-core Celeron N2840 in their laptops, which boosts higher still, to 2.58Ghz, and has a faster graphics core. As a result, the X200MA still struggles to keep up with its rivals in our benchmarks. It isn’t something you’ll notice every day, but it does make the X200MA a little less versatile.

Asus X200MA review: verdict

This is a decent laptop for the money, and, with 500GB of local storage, it’s a more flexible PC than the storage-constrained HP Stream 11. If you’re happy working in the cloud, however, the HP is the better choice.