Asus VivoBook Flip R518UA-DH51T 15.6-inch Intel Core i5-7200U Processor, 2.5GHz (up to 3.1GHz), 256GB SSD, 8GB DDR4, Windows 10

The technical specs given for this laptop are pretty skimpy (which is becoming an ugly trend these days), but I bought one and I will share what I learned below:Technical Info:Motherboard: Asus TP510UACPU: i7-8550UGPU: Integrated Intel UHD Graphics 620PCH: Sunrise Point-LP (not sure of exact model)Memory: A single SK Hynix 8 GB module (DDR4 2400 MHz)Wifi: Intel Dual-band wireless-AC 8265Intel Bluetooth Interface (I believe integrated into WiFi card)Webcam: Azurewave "USB2.0 VGA UVC WebCam"Audio: Intel - Integrated into PCHStorage: HGST 1 TB Hard Drive 5400 RPMBuild quality and quirks: The bottom and sides of the laptop are plastic. The top cover (holding the touchpad and keyboard) is metal and the cover (back of the screen) is metal. In spite of the plastic bottom and sides the machine is very rigid and does not feel cheap to me. I am not a fan of the placement of the power and volume buttons on the left side of the machine - I have accidentally hit these a few times already, but I will learn to live with it. With the exception of volume, there are no media keys... I mean the play/pause, next track, previous track, etc. buttons that you often see on laptops. There are no physical media buttons and none even with the fn modifier. You can always map your own shortcuts so this is maybe just an inconvenience, but I fail to see the wisdom of not including these.Accessibility: There are about a dozen screws that must be removed from the bottom of the laptop and then the top cover (not the bottom) can be lifted off, keyboard and all. This will require a thin blade or spudger to detach the plastic clippy bits that hold the cover down and you will surely break one or two, but it is of no real consequence.Storage expansion: The laptop ships with a 2.5" SATA hard drive. This can (and should) be removed and replaced with an SSD. I replaced this with a Samsung 850 EVO 1 TB SSD and had no problems booting from the new drive. There is also an unpopulated 22 mm by 80 mm (i.e. "2280 size") M.2 slot with M-type keying right next to the hard drive bay. The motherboard has "SSD" written next to this connector so it's purpose is pretty clear. I do not, however, know what interfaces are supported for this slot (i.e. SATA or 2 or 4-lane PCI-E for NVME) and I don't know what effort is required to boot from this device.Memory expansion: lspci sees 4 RAM banks, with only one of them populated. This would imply that there is room for expansion, but I did not tear down the machine far enough to get at these banks and so I don't know if they all actually exist.Linux support: As far as core hardware goes this machine has a pretty solid Intel-only load out, which is why I bought it (no discrete graphics or exotic wifi, etc.). I installed Debian Stretch without any problems and it booted up first try. Most hardware worked out of the box, including graphics, touchpad & keyboard, integrated sensors like accelerometers, touchscreen controller, media card reader, webcam, and wifi (which is benchmarking substantially faster under Linux than it did in Windows). The only real problem I ran into was with audio. The audio device seems to treat the internal speakers like they are hard-wired to the headphones - they play when headphones are plugged in and they are off when there are no headphones. This is probably just because the PCH is too young for my kernel and driver. There is a chance a distro like Ubuntu would just work out of the box, but I didn't try. I was able to fix the audio by building a new kernel and re-mapping the audio pins through ALSA. I am reporting the fix upstream to ALSA, so maybe this problem will go away on it's own for other owners of this laptop. At this point the only hardware that doesn't work is the fingerprint reader, which I don't care about enough to futz with. The machine is extremely snappy and smooth under Debian. I have not had any hiccups or freezes or other problems.

Book itself is ok, despite the fact that it is heavy as a sin, however, the screen is a complete disaster. The main problem isn't even laughful resolution. The problem is an extremely narrow angle of view, that completely prevents using it as a tablet. You really have to adjust and adjust and adjust it in order to keep the screen, no, not "crystal clear" as advertised. The best you can reach - would be "minimally acceptable".I am surprised, I bought this book to replace my 3 years old Lenovo Yoga and for the same price I paid for yoga 3 years ago I didn't expect that bad screen to be used.So, if you plan to use it as a notebook with occasional use as a table - may be. If primary use is table - big no-no, don't repeat my $600 mistake.

Had I known how godawful the ten key is I would not have bought this. There's no dedicated home, end, pgup, or pgdown keys so you have to turn off the number lock to use them. The decimal is also located at the top rather than appropriately at the bottom, and the arrow keys are very slim and easy to miss. I do a lot of work with data and need to be able to move around spreadsheets and databases quickly, but Asus really missed the mark on this feature. For this reason I think I'm going to return it.

This notebook is exactly what I expected. It is fast and light. The combination of metal and plastic makes it ideal to carry it around. I can easily left it from one of the edges without any problems. There's no bloatware installed, like a fresh install. I'm using his to write contracts, compose emails, and browse the web, and occasionally view some videos. In tablet more the volume keys are perfectly set, as a laptop the volume keys are out of place, but perfect trade off since if I'm consuming media it is normally in tablet mode. For my purposes it is fast enough, I have a gaming notebook and it is bulky and heavy, I gladly trade off the dedicated video for a lighter laptop. I don't play any games on it but it is not my intention to play any games on it but it seems that it would give you about average game play experience.It has an M.3 2280 SSD slot right next to the hard drive, absolutely easy to install so I did, it is faster not on boot up, left the original hard drive inside, so it has the SSD and the 1TB HD inside. Looks like it will take some work to install the additional memory so I left it alone as I do not need it. For the price I paid for this item, plus the speed, and the easy of installing an SSD, it was well worth it.

Since different versions are listed, this is the version I got: 15.6-inch Intel Core i5-7200U Processor, 256GB SSD, 8GB DDR4, Windows 10. This version doesn't have a back-lit keyboard, but that's not a problem.The price is great for a good quality touchscreen laptop.I can't give a full review because I bought it as a gift, but the person I gave it to has had no complaints. Of course, I always wipe and re-install Windows 10 myself, so the operating system and drivers have a fresh install, and there is no bloatware, and to reduce the Microsoft spyware.