ASUS has launched the latest laptop in the flip series the Zenbook Flip 14 UM462 in India. ASUS has the budget and mid range series in Vivobook while the ZenBook series are premium ultrabooks with stunning design and great performance. So lets find out how the Flip 14 from ASUS stacks up. The new ASUS ZenBook Flip 14 (UM462) adds class to the compact convertible laptops with four-sided frameless NanoEdge displays that feature ultranarrow bezels on all four sides, giving a screen-to-body ratio of up to 90% for a near-borderless viewing experience. The ZenBook Flip 14 is also powered by the new Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 and the one we tested had Ryzen 7 with 8GB of storage and 512GB SSD. So here is the detailed ASUS ZenBook Flip 14 (UM462) review with pros and cons.
Related Reading: ASUS Zenbook 14 UM431D Review
Design and Build Quality:
Zenbook series are known for stunning designs and the Zenbook Flip 14 is no far behind. It comes with aluminum top chassis with a plastic bottom section. It gives a brushed finish which looks premium for sure. The back panel does not have any patterns and it has the simple ASUS logo.The entire chassis and both 360-degree ErgoLift hinges, give the appearance of a premium laptop that is quite sturdy.
ASUS claims that ZenBook Flip 14 is torture-tested to military-grade with demanding tests that include environmental extremes of altitude, temperature and humidity and drop testing. It is also the first Zenbook flip to use Nano edge display. When you open the laptop, you can see the Ergolift which we have seen on other ASUS laptops off late. This gives a slightly better experience when typing.
You can flip the Zenbook to 360 degrees to make it look like a tablet or use in different ways for watching movies.
Keyboard and Touchpad:
The backlit keyboard on Zenbook flip 14 is good and it also has a smooth touchpad. The chicklet keys are well spaced out and easy to type on, despite the considerably small strokes. Moreover, the backlighting on the keyboard is quite good, making keys visible in all light. As mentioned before the ErgoLift hinge design offers a slight elevation, which is better than typing on a flat keyboard. However, the ZenBook Flip 14 UM462DA does have feature a fingerprint reader for unlocking nor an integrated numberpad on the touchpad. Omission of fingerprint reader is something which we didn’t expect since it is being offered in Zenbook series.
Ports and Connectivity:
On the left side of the ASUS flipbook, you get the DC jack, HDMI port, USB 3.1 type A gen 1 port along with USB 3.1 Type C port.
On the right side, you have card reader, USB 2.0 type A port, audio jack, LED lights and power button. On the connectivity front, it is fairy connected with decent set of options available for the price.
Display:
Moving on to the display of ZenBook Flip 14 UM462D, it has a 14 inch LED-backlit Full HD (1920 x 1080) 16:9 slim-bezel NanoEdge touch display. The viewing angles are good and it offers 60hz refresh rates. The brightness levels are 280nits and it is good enough for indoor usage as it is bright enough. But when you are using the laptop outdoors, you can feel the low brightness coupled with glossy display makes it difficult to use. The colors are good on the display. Since it has a touch display, you can use it as a tablet mode as well with Windows 10. The touch experience is good. The company is also including a stylus with the device, so if you are a person interested in painting, it should help.
The bezels on the display are narrow with almost 90% screen to body ratio and the top of the display has houses an HD webcam with 3D IR capability for fast face-login. The webcam quality isn’t great though.
Performance:
On the performance side, the new ZenBook Flip is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 3700U processor paired with 8GB of DRR4 RAM. The laptop also packs a 512GB PCIe SSD for faster read/write speeds. In terms of regular usaage, including basic editing, word documents, multitasking, using google chrome for browsing, it is an excellent laptop with hardly any issues. In terms of benchmark, it scored 2632 points in multi core and 829 point in single-core test. In the Cinebench R15 test, the laptop scored 332 and 1218 points in single and multi-core tests.
In terms of gaming, it can provide decent fps for causal gaming, but definitely not suited for heavy gaming. It has Radeon RX Vega 10 graphics card, which is quite good.
Audio Performance:
The Zenbook Flip has speakers tuned by Harman Kardon and they are bottom firing speakers. The audio quality is average at its best as we have seen better audio quality on Zenbook series laptops. The bass performance on the speakers are quite good though.
Battery Life:
The Zenbook Flip 14 has 42Wh 3-cell lithium-ion battery and the company is promising around 9 hours of battery life. In our testing, we got around 6-7 hours on an average which isnt bad, but not stellar either.
Summary:
That was the detailed ASUS ZenBook Flip 14 (UM462) review. So summing up, the ASUS Zenbook Flip 14 is a worthy 2 in 1 convertible laptop with good design and build, performance and battery life. The only downside is probably the dim display and also not the best audio experience. But if you in the market for a mid-range convertible laptop, then Zenbook Flip 14 is a worthy device.
