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Vivobook S 15 OLED (K3502) review

A great laptop and hygienic to boot

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With the Vivobook S15 OLED (K3502/M3502), Asus is among the many new laptops available today, which it says is the world’s first 15.6-inch laptop with a 120 Hz fast OLED panel and a resolution of 2.8K. This is packed in a housing with a metal lid that is just under 1.9 cm thin and weighs around 1.8 kg.

Not only that but this laptop sports the ASUS Antibacterial Guard. This is a special silver-ion coating applied to the most frequently touched parts of the laptop surface including the keyboard, the touchpad, the palm rest area, and the fingerprint sensor, has been scientifically shown to inhibit the growth of bacteria by over 99% over 24 hours, or so it claimed by Asus.

This works when silver ions and negatively charged microbial cells are attracted to each other upon contact. Silver ions will pierce through the surfaces of bacterial cells and damage their structure, inhibiting bacterial reproduction.

An initial sample of 10,000 bacterial cells is applied to a Petri dish surface treated with ASUS Antibacterial Guard, leaving the one below untreated. After 24 hours, the bacterial cells within the upper Petri dish were reduced to just 16. The same test, performed without the Antibacterial Guard treatment sees the count of bacterial cells grow to 28,000. This test proves ASUS Antibacterial Guard can restrict bacterial growth by more than 99%.

The top display has an aspect ratio of 16:9, a resolution of 2,880 x 1,620 pixels and shines up to 550 nits brightly, which earns it a VESA Display HDR True Black 500 certification. Alternatively, there is also an FHD OLED (1920×1080 pixels) that achieves 600 nits and also responds within 0.2ms. Both screen variants cover 100 per cent of the DCI-P3 colour space and have Pantone validation.

In the K3502 model variant, the Asus VivoBook S15 OLED is equipped with either the Core i5-12500H or the Core i7-12700H from Intel’s 12th generation. Then there’s the Intel Iris Xe Graphics solution. In the case of the M3502, on the other hand, the AMD Ryzen 7 6800H with AMD Radeon Graphics is always installed. Depending on the configuration, there is also up to 16 GB of DDR4 RAM and an M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD with a capacity of up to 1 TB.

In any case, the VivoBook S15 OLED offers two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, one USB 2.0 Type-A and one each HDMI 2.0b and 3.5 mm audio. A 720p HD camera, speakers, and microphone from Harman/Kardon as well as Wi-Fi 6(E) are also installed. The battery turns out to be 70 Wh.

The notebook is available in the colours Neutral Grey, Indie Black, and Brave Green.

Office and internet applications and simple games do not pose any major challenges for the VivoBook – this is ensured by the built-in combination of Ryzen 7 5700U APU and 16 GB of RAM. Heat and noise emissions are acceptable. The inbuilt OLED screen (FHD) offers an excellent black level and completely covers the DCI-P3 colour space. It also provides stable viewing angles, good colour reproduction, short response times and sufficiently high brightness. However, the glossy screen is a point of criticism.