The VivobookPRO 16X belongs to a new stable of Asus laptop brands that are designed for ‘creators’.
Positives: Superb screen, excellent battery life, Dialpad on touchpad1TB SSD and MicroSD card slot.
Negatives: Dull hardware design and the speakers not so effective.
The aluminium chassis is solid, but it misses out on style. But there is so much good in this laptop that you will ignore the basic design. You get a stripped logo on the lid alongside the Vivobook label. The design magic can be seen once you open the lid. The top left corner of your keyboard can’t be missed. You get a bright orange Esc key. The QWERTY keys and separate number pad are black, while the columns of keys flanking the QWERTY keys are grey.
The angled stripes on the lid are repeated on the Enter key, in white. There is a fingerprint sensor built into the power button, which sits at the top right of the keyboard. Making the usage process even easier. The keypads are well-sized, easy, and soft to use. Talking about the touchpad it is something you can’t miss. It is big in size and the best element it has is the Asus’s DialPad. Which gets activated swiping diagonally from the upper right corner of the touchpad.
The DialPad appears on the touchpad as a small solid circle inside a larger dotted circle, and its default setting is controlling screen brightness and speaker volume. When you tap the inner circle on the touchpad, a replica appears on-screen. You sweep round between the inner and outer circles to move between system brightness and system volume, tap to confirm your selection, and then sweep left and right between the inner and outer circles to adjust volume or screen brightness.
You might take some time to get the hang of it, but Asus has put a lot of effort into it. The screen is a delight. With a 16:10 aspect ratio and 4K resolution, it’s a treat for the creators. Your webcam sits at the top with an easy slider for privacy. Asus claims a screen-to-body ratio of 86 percent.nThe screen has 550 nits peak brightness, which worked very well for me. I found it easy to my eye indoors as well as outdoor.
The stereo speakers on the VivoBook Pro X series are sound certified by Harman Kardon. But then still if you are watching a movie on your laptop or as a content creator editing a visual with sound, then the volume might be a bit of a disappointment.
ASUS AI Noise-Canceling Technology employs machine learning to isolate unwanted noise from human speech. The ClearVoice Mic feature in the MyASUS app can filter out ambient noise, and the multi-Presenter mode normalises all individual voices from different positions for optimum group conference-call quality. The ClearVoice Speaker feature filters out all ambient noise apart from human speech — so you will hear what everyone else is saying.
The Vivobook PRO 16X gets AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX processor with Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti graphics. It had 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, and there’s also a built-in MicroSD card reader. On the right edge, the MicroSD card reader is joined by a USB-A port, a full-size HDMI connector, a USB-C port and a 3.5mm combo audio jack. When you talk about a creator laptop one thing that is most important is the battery. You get a 96WHr battery here. ASUS Battery Health Charging Technology claims to allow for a battery lifespan that is 3X longer than standard lithium-ion batteries. Fast-charge technology also lets you charge a low battery to 60 percent in just 49 minutes (using the supplied AC adapter).
Verdict:
The Asus Vivobook 16X is a creator product with a great screen, good keypad amazing battery life and above all a very useful Dialpad. It does miss out on the hardware part which might be a letdown for a few.