Asus VIVOBOOK 13 Slate OLED Review – CHEAP OLED TABLET PC!

Asus’ Vivobook 13 Slate OLED is a quirky, yet remarkably good value Windows 11 tablet PC. Everything you see here – the tablet, the removable magnetic kickstand, the magnetic type cover, and the stylus all come in at just £600 – at least for the last gen model. Pricing for this one should be pretty much the same, although as always I’ll leave a link in the description for you to check out if you’re interested. For some context, that’s not far off what Apple wants for just the magic keyboard and the Apple Pencil for the iPad Pro – without the actual iPad! So while that seems like a great deal – and I do think it is – you should also temper your expectations on this at least a bit. 

On the surface – pun intended – this is a remarkably well built tablet. It feels premium with its metal shell, leather feeling magnetic folding stand – no I don’t know why this is a magnetic attachable piece, but it is – and even the type cover feels pretty decent. The tablet itself is pretty thin, with a light enough weight to not let it bother you when travelling, and generally feels good in the hands. The detachable keyboard cover does have a bad habit of detaching rather easily – especially when pulled from one of the sides – which can get frustrating especially as with tablets like this I always find them impossible to position nicely on my lap, and when you do find a good position it can just fall off. 

What’s more frustrating though is the type cover’s rigidity, or lack thereof. The keyboard section isn’t the problem here – in fact that’s quite nice. It’s a good typing experience on a flat surface like a desk and even on my lap worked remarkably well. No, the problem here is that trackpad. Unlike a lot of type covers, Asus decided to fit this one with a physical mouse click – you can hear it here. Generally that’d be a good thing – a bit of extra kinesthetic feedback is always welcomed – but this specific design fails in one crucial way. See, if you are typing with this on your lap, you might start to notice some ghost clicks. No, this isn’t from bad palm rejection, it’s from the type cover. Here – see when I bend it you here the click. Yep, that’s the mouse click being triggered from the bottom. Genius. 

The real star of the show here though is this OLED panel. It’s 16:9 – something a lot of tablets don’t offer – and 1080p. 1080p60, specifically. That’s definitely lacking, but the panel itself really makes up for it with absolutely stunning colours. It looks beautiful – everything looks vibrant with stunning perfect blacks. According to my SpyderX this panel actually offers more than 100% of the DCI-P3 spectrum, almost managing to offer both 100% in the DCI-P3 spectrum AND the AdobeRGB spectrum – a rather difficult feat. The max brightness I saw was only around 370 nits – a fair bit lower than the 550 nits Asus claims, and a fair bit less than I’d want for outdoor use, but for indoor use or while travelling it’s perfectly fine. It’s beautifully accurate too – not absolutely perfect with a maximum DeltaE of 3, but an average of 1.63 is pretty great especially for a tablet, and even more so at this price. 

Being an OLED, you would expect this to have near instant response times – and technically it does. Only technically though… Here’s a look at some of the response time results my open source response time tool captured (and yes you can buy one of these from me at OSRTT.com!). On a falling transition you’ll generally find it to be effectively instant – around 1ms is what I’m seeing here, but on a rising transition, i.e. going from a darker shade to a lighter one, you’ll find it does the standard OLED undershooting. It doesn’t quite get to the correct light level in the first frame, and because this is a 60Hz display, that means you’ve got to wait another 16.7ms for it to correct that. In practice that doesn’t make too much of a difference – it’s not like this is a gaming machine or anything – but it is something I think you should know about before you put your cash down on one!

Something you might have noticed down at the bottom right there is the result latency – as in how long it takes for the machine to register the input change and start to change what’s on screen to match that request. Those results were taking around 80 to 100 ms. That’s really, really bad. Like, a normal laptop takes maybe 20ms at most normally, so for this to be four to five times slower, yeah that’s pretty bad. If you are wondering if that affects the stylus input too, you’ll be disheartened to know the answer is yes. Here’s some 1000 FPS footage of me swiping the pen quickly. I count about 100 frames between me starting to swipe and the tablet starting to draw the line on screen. While it isn’t quite unusable, it does mean it’s rather difficult to be precise. You might also notice that with my fast swipes here, just how much of the line gets drawn at once. Because this is only a 60 Hz panel, any sort of fast movement like that is going to be even less accurate and smooth. 

Even though the pen is apparently sampling at 266 Hz – a weird number to go with there Asus – if the display you’re drawing on doesn’t update that fast, you get quite a disconnected experience. For my novice hands I’m not all that bothered, but I’m sure for a more talented hand that might be a frustrating experience. Still, you do get the fully featured experience – with 4096 pressure levels, varying pen tip force and even cool features like tilting the stylus to do shading versus a finer point at the tip – plus four interchangeable pen tips for different levels of resistance, it really is the complete package. Also, the Asus Pen charges with a hidden USB C port in the upper section – no need to have this sticking straight out the tablet’s charging port like a moron!

Something that isn’t quite as fully featured though is the I/O. You get a grand total of two USB C 3.2 Gen 2 ports – both of which can support display outputs or charging – a headphone jack and a microSD card slot. While that is more than an iPad, for a windows machine that looks wide enough to fit a Type A port, it would have been nice to see that available rather than live that dongle life. I suppose since this isn’t exactly aimed at power users, perhaps that is enough. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Something that is pretty decent is the battery life. You’ve got a 50 Wh battery which Asus claims should give you a full 10 hours of usage out of this. I’d say that’s more like between 6 and 8 hours depending on screen brightness and what you’re doing, but all of that is somewhat mute thanks to Windows Modern Standby. This will turn itself on and drain its battery constantly, and more annoyingly it’ll start clicking on stuff because the display thinks the type cover is a finger. That was annoying to find it on chrome with paypal and a bunch of other tabs open. Still, for a Windows machine, the battery life isn’t too bad.

Performance on the other hand is, well, non-existent. Just trying to load a web page can take a while, the watercolour brush in Adobe Fresco is clearly rendering at maybe 10 FPS when it’s mixing colours, and in my unreal engine 4 response time testing window which happily runs at 600 to 1000 FPS on any other machine, that could only muster around 40 FPS. Yeah…

If you must watch this thing be brutalised, let me just show you a simple comparison. On the left is our poor little Slate OLED with its Core i3-N300 octo-core and 8GB of RAM, and on the right is a modestly specced Acer Nitro 5 with an i5-12500H. Nothing too fancy, but let’s run this and see how they compare. I’m going to speed this up so we don’t waste too much time here – but the still modest i5 is done rendering in less than half the time of the N300. The i5 nets a score of around 12,000, compared to just 3,500 from the N300. The fact that the eight cores in the N300 don’t offer hyperthreading makes me think these are just eight of the efficiency cores found in the Alder Lake lineup – plus the fact this has a 7W TDP isn’t helping with the performance, or lack thereof. 

The processor is by far the weakest part of this package – I’d call it underpowered even by today’s standards, and I don’t think it’ll hold up very well going forward either. The meagre 8GB of RAM isn’t helping, although the just 256GB of storage – much of which is eaten up by Windows and formatting – is possibly a bigger deal. While I can’t imagine you’d be filling this with pictures – despite the front and rear facing cameras, neither of which are particularly inspiring – you might want to store some programs, movies for your travels, and plenty of drawings, and I can see how that might get a little cramped rather quickly. Apparently some models and markets get 512GB and that’s a better deal for sure, but still.

The biggest problem by far with the Slate OLED is the fact that this is a Windows tablet. The usage experience leaves a lot to be desired. I found myself NEEDING the type cover connected to be able to operate the machine effectively, and even with Windows scaling, the whole interface is just horrible to use with touch or pen only. The on screen keyboard does show up – about 5 seconds too slowly – the handwriting input does too although that’s pretty naff for detecting handwriting. Needing to double tap icons on the desktop, having tiny buttons for apps and just the mess that is the advert board – sorry start menu. It’s pretty far from a cohesive experience, compared to something like an iPad or even an Android tablet. The usage experience with an iPad Pro is seamless. It’s smooth, responsive and well thought out. You have an endless library of apps that are easy to navigate with touch or pen input, and you can even use it more like a PC if you want. You have a freaking M2 chip and 8GB of unified memory in the iPad Pro – and if you opt for more storage you get 16GB of RAM instead! Sure, it costs more than three of these for that, but it’s safe to say you’d notice the difference. 

I think all in all this isn’t a bad tablet. Windows really makes it hard to recommend, although at the price we’re expecting it to be it might not be too bad. The previous model can be had for more like $350 in the US right now which I think is a bit more of a reasonable price once you factor in the distinct lack of horsepower, the small storage space and, well, Windows. It really is in a bit of a weird position. It’s not powerful enough to be your main PC – while travelling or not – but it isn’t ARM and running a touch first OS like Android or iPadOS, so it doesn’t really fit into either category. If drawing is important to you, you might want to look elsewhere for a fast refresh rate and lower latency option. If you want a media consumption device, get an Android tablet. If you want a one sizes fits all PC tablet that isn’t really powerful enough, maybe check this out.