The market is flooded with cheap budget laptops, but the Asus L210 is a tiny 11-inch laptop with a neat little trick up its sleeve that helps it stand out from the rest of the competition.
Body and Build
The Asus laptop l210 is nothing special regarding its build quality. Its body is wholly built of plastic, yet it does not feel like it can break easily. The L210 has thick bezels on the front, which further helps make its screen feel small.
We also noticed that there are no vents on this laptop as the Celeron in this Asus laptop can be cooled without a fan, so that’s nice knowing there won’t be any fan noise when dust gets clogged up in the vents.
Ports and I/O
Let’s talk about ports. The Asus laptop L210 features a full HDMI 1.4 port, a Type A USB 3.1 port, and a Type C 3.1 port on the left side. This port is only for file transfer, and you can not charge the laptop with this, nor can you connect a display to this laptop via this port. The laptop has a headphone microphone combo jack and a USB 2.0 Type-A port on the right side, which is ideal for plugging a mouse.
Keyboard, Trackpad, and Speakers
Keyboard
Before I go any further, I want to clear this out. This Asus laptop L210 does NOT have a backlit keyboard. It confuses me how the Amazon listing for this laptop clearly states that it has a backlit keyboard while it doesn’t, misleading customers. Apart from this, the computer is OK for the most part. The keys are well spaced out with good travel, which makes the typing experience fine. Also, one kinda nice thing about this laptop is that it has a yellow accent Enter button which helps the button stand out.
Asus L210’s interesting trackpad
The Asus laptop L210 stands out with its distinctive feature, which is its trackpad. This laptop has a built-in Numpad on its trackpad that you can toggle with a capacitive button on the top right of the trackpad. This is a simple addition for Accountants and for those who study Math. You can use the trackpad while the Numpad toggle is on, but I won’t recommend it because it may result in accidental presses of the number. As for the trackpad experience, it is acceptable and responsive and does the job just fine.
Speakers
It is nothing special. The Asus laptop L210 has down-firing speakers which lack bass, and it’s only mids. Also, this laptop completely loses its sound when you place it on a soft surface like a bed or a couch since there is nothing that the sound could bounce off. So if you want to use the speakers, keep the laptop on a hard surface like a table. But for the most part, I would recommend using headphones or external speakers.
Specs
Let’s talk specs. The Asus laptop L210 has a Celeron, a dual-core processor clocked at 2.6Ghz. This chip is the weakest offering from Intel that is optimal for web browsing and Word processing tasks. At the same time, the weakness of this CPU allows it to be efficient, which helps this laptop to stay fanless and helps it last longer. Also, if it isn’t evident by now, the thought of gaming on this laptop will send down shivers on this Celeron’s spine.
Also, the Intel Integrated Graphics don’t either, so please, don’t game on this laptop.
The Asus laptop L210 has 64GB of eMMC storage, which is common in laptops at this price point; however, this laptop stands out with the NVME expansion option allowing you to install a high-speed SSD in this laptop is a welcome option.
However, the expansion options end just there. The Asus laptop L210 fails with its 4GB non-expandable RAM, which is a major dealbreaker because, from my experience, Windows start to suffer if you open a few tabs of Chrome and install some apps with that much RAM. And the 8GB ram should be just a minimal amount of RAM to have an optimal experience using Windows.
Apart from this, the laptop comes with your average WiFI 5 and Bluetooth 4.0 and has a VGA camera that has potato quality and is acceptable for your average zoom call.
The battery is where this laptop also shines. With its 38Wh, Asus laptop L210 can easily last 10 hrs, whereas you can get 8 hrs minimum even if you use it heavily. This is possible because of its power-efficient processor and screen, which brings us to its display.
Asus L210’s awful display
This laptop display is not good. The Asus laptop L210 comes with an 11-inch TN display with bad viewing angles, and it just doesn’t get bright enough, so don’t think about using it out in the sun. Also, the display has washed-out colors, so don’t plan to watch anything on it, and you are better off watching Netflix on your phone, which most likely has a better display.
Future Upgradability and Expansion
This laptop runs Windows 11 out of the box, so there shouldn’t be an issue on the software side of things. And as for the storage, it also got you covered with its NVME expansion bay. But none of this matters considering that Asus L210 RAM is not upgradable, which is a big deal breaker because this laptop cannot last long with its measly 4GB RAM.
Conclusion
So to conclude this, I won’t recommend this laptop. Usually, such a weak laptop can be fine for someone willing to do only basic tasks like checking Facebook or watching your occasional Youtube, where it would be a great fit for kids and the elderly. But the insufficient RAM of this laptop would render this laptop unusable soon and would end up being e-waste.
If you are tech-savvy enough, you might be able to get a useable experience out of this by installing Linux or Chrome OS, but even then, I don’t think it’s worth going through that pain.
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