Asus L402SA

Asus L402SA always feel like a gamble. But this is one you might want to take, because the 14-inch notebook offers a comfy keyboard, a screen that’s more colorful than those on low-cost competitors and strong audio, all in a lightweight design. You also get a choice of three colors. The Celeron processor in this puppy pretty much rules out vigorous multitasking, and the battery life is below average. But overall, the L402SA is a pretty good bargain.

Design

Cheap laptops don’t need to feel disposable. Check out the L402SA’s sturdy hinge, as well as its deck, which doesn’t flex the way many others do. It comes in white (don’t, just don’t), dark blue (which looks black) and red (the one to get).

Weighing 3.3 pounds and measuring 0.9 inches thick, the L402SA is lighter than the Dell Inspiron 14 (3.5 pounds, 0.8 inches) and thicker than the HP Stream 14 (3.2 pounds, 0.7 inches).

The notebook’s left side houses its ports for power, Ethernet, VGA , HDMI and USB 3.0, as well as its SD memory reader. Over on the right, you’ll find a USB 2.0 port, headphone jack and security lock slot. The Stream 14 and the Inspiron 14 do not include Ethernet or VGA.

Display

As I watched a trailer for Black Panther on the L402SA, I noticed that the image appeared slightly washed out, causing blacks to appear as dark gray. Other hues, such as the purple in Forest Whitaker’s purple robes and gold decor, survived intact. The low-res 1366 x 768-pixel display was an issue from the start of the clip, as I noticed pixelation in Wakandan waterfalls and Andy Serkis’ head.

Producing 92.2 percent of the sRGB color spectrum, the L402SA’s panel is more colorful than those in the Inspiron 14 (81.4 percent) and the Stream 14 (81.5 percent).

Emitting up to 206 nits of brightness, the L402SA outshines the 135-nit Inspiron 14 and the 186-nit Stream 14. While its colors retain strength at 30 degrees to the left and right, the panel is so glossy that the reflected light obscured the colors.

Keyboard and Touchpad

You’ll be surprised by the quality of the typing and clicking on the L402SA. While testing the keyboard on the 10fastfingers typing test, I clicked my way to 74 words per minute, which is near my 80-wpm average. Its responsive keys helped to enable this experience, with 70 grams of actuation force (even better than the 60 grams we hope to see) required and 1.3 millimeters of travel (just shy of the 1.5 to 2.0 mm we prefer).

However, the shrunken right Shift and Control keys created issues for me throughout testing. While I get that Asus made them smaller to accommodate full-size directional keys, it led me to accidentally hit the up, down and left keys, when I intended to use Shift and Control. Further complicating things is a column of keys on the far right of the keyboard, including Page Up, Page Down and Delete, making them hard to touch-type, as nobody else puts them there.

The L402SA’s 4.1 x 2.8-inch touchpad offers accurate tracking and a solid feel to each click. Unfortunately, scrolling on the machine can be a bit stuttery, which is likely owed to its budget parts.

Audio

The L402SA’s speakers filled our medium-size conference room with a solid version of DJ Khaled’s “I’m The One.” Lil Wayne’s gravelly vocals came through as clear as Justin Bieber’s, the track’s bass hit with a correct twang and the song’s panoply of varied synths all sounded accurate.

The included IcePower Audio Wizard sound app defaults to the Music setting, where you should keep it set. All of the other modes, especially Off and Movie, tend to blow out background noise and muffle the vocals.

Performance

The Asus L402SA’s Intel Celeron N3060 CPU and 4GB of RAM might make you forget the definition of multitasking. While I could work on this review in a Google Doc in a single Chrome tab, I saw slowdown and stutter after I added three more tabs (including HipChat and Outlook) as I tried to write this review.

The L402SA earned a score of 1,934 on the Geekbench 4 general performance benchmark, which is similar to the 1,911 from the Stream 14 (Celeron N3060, 4GB of RAM) and narrowly beats the 1,807 from the Inspiron 14 (Celeron N3060, 2GB of RAM).

The 32GB eMMC hard drive in the L402SA needed 6 minutes to copy 4.97GB of files, for a rate of 14 MBps. That’s slower than the 24.7-MBps eMMC drive in the Stream 14.

The L402SA needed 13 minutes and 15 seconds to finish our OpenOffice macro test (matching 20,000 names to addresses), which is similar to the 13:04 time from the Stream 14.

The integrated Intel HD Graphics chip in the L402SA enabled a score of 19,784 on the 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited benchmark. That’s close to the 19,073 from the Stream 14 (Intel HD Graphics 400) and beats the 11,967 from the Inspiron 14 (Intel HD Graphics).

Battery Life

You definitely get what you pay for when it comes to the L402SA’s battery life.