ASUS EeeBook E402MA product reviews

ASUS E402MA - What is it?
The ASUS 402MA is a budget conscious 14.6" Windows 10 laptop for the entry level market. Coming in an array of vibrant colours- Red, Blue and White and being relatively light at just over 1.5kg, it will appeal to many demographics.

Looks:
Straight out of the well-designed box, the review model received looks great in Ice White. The keyboard feels smooth with polished over style buttons and a very large intuitive smart touchpad with integrated click. An overall smooth finish and rounded edges, staycool palm area and VGA Skype camera there is a lot to like about this unit.

Connectivity:
Generic connections you would expect to be present on a laptop are all there, USB 2 and USB 3 even if only one of each, an HDMI port, VGA port, Ethernet port, Headphone/microphone combo jack, Kingston lock, SD card slot and the charging connector.

Specifications:
The review model came pre-loaded with Windows 10 and a 500Gb SSD internal HDD. It had 4Mb of RAM which is good, if it came with 2Gb I suspect it would really cripple the performance of this machine overall as it is, because of the 64bit Intel Celeron running at 1.83GHz and the heavy Windows 10 OS. The camera is only VGA quality and I mean 640x480px resolution and the screen resolution is far from full HD coming in at 1366x768 pixels. The screen is not a touch screen. The battery pack is a 2 cell variety.

Usage & Feel:
I find the notebook to be very appealing visually, it feels sturdy even though it is clearly 90% plastic. Because of its size it does not need to rely on a metal chassis, which would contribute to a heavier machine. It has only one vent port on the bottom which was quite surprising, but at the same time when it has a reasonably low power consumption, this isn't surprising. The internal temperatures are supposed to actually be lower than body temp between 28 deg and 35 deg.

The plastic exterior tarnishes quickly with fingerprints, which may bother those that like having a suregrip style finish that does not show up handling marks easily. The screen has a reflective sheen coating that makes the colours stand out indoors but in any real direct sunlight the brightness of the screen being turned all the way up will still struggle to get the images to your eyes without you giving up and going inside or into shade.

The keyboard feels very responsive and soft touch, whilst the smart touchpad supports gestures necessary for using a windows 8.1 and later OS. The battery lifetime from full charge afforded about 6 hours of use before we had to recharge. This was just letting the OS control the consumption on the Balanced setting.

I was able to browse the web easily and have many tabs open and roll You Tube videos without issue. The sonic master sound system boasted "clear and powerful sound" and even though I was not expecting a Beats style response or anything like that it did definitely deliver volume that did not just rely on narrow ranges and trebles. It sounded good.

Missing an optical drive should not be too much of an issue because most of the notebooks these days are focussing on long battery life and cloud services, if you really needed to install something from optical media, there are other ways around it and I was not bothered.

Price and Value:
I cannot for the life of me find a price for this unit so I cannot comment on whether it is good bad or ugly overall. I would rational that if it was over $450ish NZD you should probably keep walking to something with a 15 inch screen and made to be a laptop. This is a laptop cum notebook. It feels like a notebook but wants to reach for the stars and be a strong laptop. It can't do both.

It feels like a second machine in your daughter's room to watch Seven Stupid Girls or whatever it is called on You Tube, or play candy crush while keeping up with friends on Facebook. It is not a university student's machine to write a thesis on and complete their 4 year degree, the screen is just too small, the battery life lacks and there is a good chance you would have your eye on a purpose machine for that anyway.

It does that Facebook job and second room job extremely well coupled with its look and feel it was a hit in our household. My 7 year old daughter wanted to keep it and "test it out" in her room. Enough said. If they had put an HD camera in it and improved on the screen resolution it should steal all the competition.