ASUS E402MA Notebook review: Stands out for low price but too much dependent on cloud for storage
The Asus E402MA stands out for its low price, light weight and simple design but the challenge of storage and hardware is hard to ignore.
By Mohd Ujaley
With cloud technology getting the momentum, companies such as Microsoft is offering Office 365 fully in cloud and variety of other streamlining services is also joining the race to provide an alternate to locally storing the data on the system. In recent past, laptop makers have also started experimenting with machines having limited internal storage, usually in the range of 30GB-50GB, along with capability to sync with independent cloud storage service providers.
Asus E402MA is an attempt of the company in this direction. Priced at Rs 16,999, the Asus E402MA is a lean machine with 14-inch screen and modest set of specifications that include a quad-core Celeron N2840 processor, paired with 2GB of RAM and a 32GB of storage.
You must be thinking, is 32GB storage for a notebook or laptop is enough? Obviously not, that is why either you have to take advantage of online applications like Dropbox, Google Drive etc. or go for models with 500GB, 750GB or 1TB hard drives. We explore this notebook for over a week and here are the fine details for you.
Let us start with design; the Asus E402MA comes with a decent and simple design without any notable stylistic features. The lid and keyboard are made from plastic, whereas the underside and screen bezel are made from indistinct matte plastic. Both of them hardly attract any greasy mark or fingerprint.
The 14-inch screen has 1368 x 768 pixel-resolution display and it is covered in a reflective coating, which helps the screen appear more vibrant indoors but you cannot use it in bright sunlight. A low resolution camera is placed above the screen that can be used for video chatting. The camera offers average quality, so lesser you expect, better it is. The track-pad and keyboard are responsive, easy to use and not too spongy.
On connectivity front, the notebook comes with all required ports and connectivity options. It has both VGA and HDMI on the left side for easy video output and a 3.5mm microphone jack on right side for both audio input and output. There is also a USB 3.0 port on the left side and another USB 2.0 port on the right for accessing data cards. RJ45 network connector and SD memory card slot have also been provided.
On the performance front, despite Asus E402MA packing the low-end hardware configurations, there is hardly any noticeable impact on the performance. Booting is incredibly speedy and applications start very quickly. The notebook is powered by a quad-core Celeron N2840 processor, paired with 2GB of RAM and a 32GB of storage.
Good processor means you can access most of the application smoothly but one of the key limitations of this notebook is that very soon you would go out of storage capacity and hence will have to struggle to save applications on the system.
However, One of the impressive things about E402MA is its light weight that is just 1.65kg. Although, it is easy to carry but to use it, one has to ensure reliable and fast internet connection. Therefore, if you are comfortable using multiple online applications, then perhaps E402MA is fast enough to work on web-based applications. As far as battery life is concern, E402MA comes with a 2Cells 32 Whrs battery. The battery life is decent and it is at par with any other notebook in this range.
During the review period, the notebook handled each and everything quite smoothly but overall there is nothing distinctive about this device. It stands out for low price, light weights and simple design but the challenge of storage and hardware is hard to ignore.
Estimated Street Price: Rs 16,999
