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By now, consumers are familiar, if not partial, to Qualcomm-powered smartphones. Some of the most efficient flagships as well as mid-range smartphones are driven by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors. Perhaps its latest launch in the laptop market is a signal that it would want to win over consumers here as well. The Asus Vivobook S15 runs on the new Snapdragon X Elite platform, one of the first ARM-based processors designed for Windows laptops. I’ve been using this for the last couple of weeks and here are my impressions.
Design
The Asus Vivobook S15 stands out with its ultra-slim 14.7 mm profile, making it one of the thinnest 15-inch laptops available. Weighing just 1.42 kg and featuring an all-metal chassis, it is incredibly portable — perfect for those constantly on the move.
Display
The Vivobook S15 features a 15.6 inch, 3K (2880 x 1620) OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate. Hitting play on the new trailer of The Greatest of All Time featuring Vijay, I noticed the OLED display offering some excellent contrasts, even in low-light scenes.
Everything I watched on the laptop looked well-saturated and sharp by default. With 16:9 aspect ratio, the display is more geared for media consumption like movies, which is a plus for people looking for a device for dual purpose use: for work and entertainment post-work.
The downward-firing Harman Kardon speakers were pretty decent. On Hanumankind’s Big Dawgs, the audio was loud and crisp but the rap and percussion sections felt muffled and flatter compared to when I played it on an external Bluetooth speaker or my headphones.
Productivity
The keyboard offered a decent amount of key travel while typing long documents. The laptop features single-zone RGB lighting, which can be adjusted using the MyAsus app. I could customise the display’s colour profile, choose between different battery and performance modes and update drivers for various apps. The keypad was responsive and incorporated Asus’ smart gestures, which let me adjust the screen brightness and volume levels by swiping up or down, along the corners of the trackpad. The laptop features a dedicated Microsoft Copilot key that can be used to call upon Copilot, and the laptop was quickly able to generate results for queries posted on the platform. It also offers Windows studio effects such as studio lighting options and blurring out backgrounds, though the 1080P webcam which was quite grainy in a decently lit office.
Performance
The laptop features the Snapdragon X Elite X1E 78 100 processor, clocking in at 3.4GHz, a Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, 16 GB RAM and 1 TB storage. In synthetic benchmarks like GeekBench 6(ARM), the Vivobook S15 scored 2245 on the single core and 13, 216 on the multi-core benchmarks, along with 20,647 on the OpenCL benchmark.
While not exactly a performance powerhouse, the Vivobook S15 is speedy with content creation. I was able to render a 2:29 minute green-screen footage with an office background in 6:30 minutes on Davinci Resolve 19, and a simple 3-minute 1080P timeline with text in just above a minute. These results, while not groundbreaking, can help content creators get work done easily during transit or layovers.
While it does have two fans for cooling, the metal body tends to run quite warm even during basic video playback. While rendering multimedia content, it stayed consistently efficient and also quiet.
I wouldn’t recommend this ultrabook for gaming enthusiasts. There are very few games that have native compatibility with the Windows ARM processor. It did run games such as Counter-Strike 2 at 56-70 FPS in Windowed Mode, without which the game would fail to render. Over time, the game compatibility is likely to increase but for now, I would stick to Solitaire on this one.
Connectivity
The Asus Vivobook S15 has an HDMI port, two USB-C ports that double as power ports, a MicroSD card slot and a headphone port on the left. On the right, there are two USB-A ports along with the power port. While it offers ample connectivity options, it would have been nice to have USB-C ports on both sides, instead of only on the left.
Battery
With basic use, the Asus Vivobook S15 OLED easily delivers 8-10 hours of usage. When working on social media posts, doing some lightweight audio and video editing and researching to create videos, there was usually about 40 per cent battery left at the end of my work day. In terms of battery life, the Vivobook S15 is a close competitor to the likes of Macbook Air 15 M3(2023). It took about 1.5 hours to fully charge the device using the 90 W USB-C adapter. It also quickly powers up to 60 per cent in less than an hour. The standby time is also excellent, considering it barely dropped 5 per cent battery over almost a week of standby.
Conclusion
The Asus Vivobook S15 laptop offers great performance, display, battery life and acoustics, especially considering its price. Given that it is the first-gen laptop on the ARM platform, it may take some time to onboard native versions of many popular apps such as Adobe Illustrator and Microsoft’s Game Pass. For now, if you want a feature-packed laptop that is easy on your pocket and your back, then you can’t go wrong with the Asus Vivobook S15.
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