A lot of light weight notebooks have been in the news lately. Lenovo, Apple, and HP have all been showing off their competition. Well, Asus just came out with a attractively priced 15.6-inch multimode notebook called the Transformer Book Flip TP550LA, and it has plenty of good ol' strong Asus characteristics. Just know ahead of time, though, this thing is large and heavy. Hey, it runs a solid processor and has a bunch of hard drive space! Oh yeah, it also skimps on screen resolution and could warrant battery life complaints. So, if you're catching my drift, the Asus Transformer has its ups and downs.

The Asus Transformer Book Flip TP550LA is a convertible touchscreen laptop, with its “unique” feature being that it “flips” (rotates) a full 360 degrees. This is nothing new, a lot of companies are doing this. I guess you could say the difference here would be that when you flip the device to turn it into a “tablet”, you're getting a massive 15.6-inch tablet. The good news is the Book Flip is surely a laptop, as it sports strong enough specs to prove it's a fully powered PC (IT Por Portal).

But first, let's tackle the elephant in the room. Under its black and silver design is a lot of weight. Somehow Asus was able to make the Book Flip looks thinner than it actually is, possibly in the way the base section is sharply angled, and the four corners are rounded instead of boxy (ZD Net). Measuring 38cm x 26.1cm x 2.74cm and weighing 2.6kg, you wouldn't want to lug this thing around all day. It's screen resolution might disappoint, considering 1,366 x 768 pixels isn't much on that big of a screen.

According to Microsoft's Windows Experience Index (WEI) benchmarks, the Book Flip got a pretty good grade in terms of processor (Intel Core i5 1.7Ghz) and memory speed; only held back a bit by its Intel HD Graphics 4400 GPU, and 5,400rpm hard drive. It comes with 8GB of DDR3 SDRAM, 750GB of HDD, and a bunch of connectivity options (ZD Net). As far as battery life however, it kind of sucks, only making it about 5 hours on a 38Wh lithium-polymer battery.

This is a good laptop for business or home, but serious gamers and video editors should opt for something with higher graphics. In hybrid/tablet mode, it might be too heavy to hold for more than a few minutes, but propping it on a desk or table should do the trick. It comes with Windows 8.1 preloaded and with a decent price of 583.33 Euros, you make the decision whether the good outweighs the bad.