Asus did, however, use the extra space to cram in something incredibly useful: a second USB port, and it’s USB 3.0 at that. Most of the competitors’ models we’ve seen so far only come with a single USB 2.0 port. They also added a headphone jack, which may not be quite as useful as the second USB port, but it could come in handy if your monitor doesn’t happen to have one.
The VivoStick is also based on Intel’s Cherry Trail Atom, which should give it an edge on the competition in terms of performance. Asus didn’t reveal which chip it was, but TechRadar seems confident that it’s clocked at 1.44GHz (burtsable to 1.84GHz). The VivoStick also comes with Windows 10 pre-installed, and Asus will be offering a mobile app that lets you control it from your tablet or smartphone.
As good as it looks, the VivoStick does still have a couple of shortcomings. For one thing, it’s still running an Atom processor, so even though it should perform better than similar sticks it’s not meant for intense tasks like gaming (though at low settings plenty of titles will run just fine).
The other is the lack of a microSD slot. Sure, you can hook up a specious external hard drive to one of those USB ports and stream video from Hulu, Netflix, or your own NAS… but a bit more room to install apps and casual games would’ve been nice. Still, at $129 the VivoStick looks like a solid deal if you’re in the market for a pocketable PC.
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