ASUS VivoStick – Basic meets Portability – Hungry Geeks

Franklin Garcia 8 years ago 3 min read

With the PC becoming more and more flexible, the desktop is no longer the image of a giant PC tower paired with a monitor. One rising form factor is the PC Stick, a small stick that looks like a Stabilo which actually is a PC that is capable of making a monitor into a PC.

ASUS lend us the VivoStick where it’s their first PC stick. For the Vivostick, ASUS went into a more fashionable look which other PC sticks opted a futuristic look. While the look of the PC stick won’t be much of an advantage (Since it will be plugged at the back of a monitor / TV), we appreciate this since you’ll definitely have to carry this from time to time.

The VivoStick is powered by an Intel Atom X5-Z8350 processor up to 1.92GHz, paired with a 2GB RAM and 32GB storage. It won’t impress any PC enthusiast but the target of a VivoStick is more of functionality / portability rather than performance.

But what makes the VivoStick interesting? It’s so portable that you have a full pledged PC on your hands, this is very good for businesses or houses that have limited space. All you need is an HDMI enabled monitor / TV to start.

At the side is 1x USB 2.0 port, 1x USB3.0 Port and 3.5mm audio jack, the grills you see at the back and sides are the ventilation ports for the small fan inside.

Powering the device up is very straight forward, booting up takes around 45 seconds which is pretty normal. The Vivostick is capable of playing Full HD quality videos, basic office, browsing and pretty much everyday task you do on a laptop.

We tried playing a Full HD video, open basic Microsoft office and Microsoft edge browser (Yes, not chrome as it eats too much RAM). Which eats up from around 40% to 60% of PC performance, it’s a good mix of everyday applications you open.

The VivoStick is powered by simply a 2.4A / 5V power adapter which won’t even cost more than 5 pesos of electricity a day. This is an advantage for potential business owners who wants to lower operation cost and even upgrade software (Hello Windows 10).

We were left with 28GB of working storage (out of 32GB) and 14GB available storage to install your programs such as office, browsers, etc. This might not be big for some, but given the power of the VivoStick it’s enough for users of flash storage to expand storage.

For SMEs, the VivoStick can cater to your business need and still have storage for reports and even your own programs.

We used the VivoStick for a Netflix marathon and we didn’t see any problem in terms of thermal management, we didn’t encounter any overheating alert for using it more than 8 hours.

One problem we only see here is the limited number of USB ports, if you are the mobile person we suggest to use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse so you can maximize your ports for storage.

Overall the VivoStick is a small wonder, its for people who needs a casual PC to browse, surf, watch videos or do light applications. The portability of the VivoStick has a potential to power or monitors for small houses or business owners.

Priced for Php8,400, you might think that it’s still cheaper or same price to assemble your own PC. But the portability, energy efficiency, and potential are what you aim for the VivoStick. We wished though that ASUS could have included a mouse / keyboard as bundle.

Pros