It’s that phase in the Windows 8 cycle of life when products start getting reasonable prices. We’ve already seen a HP Envy X2 hybrid with a crazy good price, sub $600 and now we’ve got some ASUS devices with an interesting price tag. The VivoBook S500 and S550, the biggest of the VivoBook range are on sale.
These are 15.6 inch multitouch devices with a 1366 x 768 pixel resolution and the S500 comes with this config: 1.7 GHz Core i5 processor, 6 GB of RAM and an Intel GMA HD GPU, plus 500 GB HDD and 24 GB SSD. The S550 is almost the same, with Core i3/i5/i7 versions, but it also throws in the mix an optical drive for physical media. The price of the S500 is $699 and the Core i5 S550 costs $750.
Amazon has both on sale since March 4th, but everything went down without big fanfare. There’s also ASUS SonicMaster audio technology on both devices and ASUS Smart Gesture technology. There’s also cloud computing included here and 2 second instant on resume from sleep mode, for ultra fast access to Windows 8.
