Zenbook pro duo full#
Zenbook pro duo portable#

On the other hand, though, this sort of form-factor remains impractical anywhere besides on a spacious desk, adds in weight and adds to the notebook’s total cost.ĭown below we’ve gathered all our thoughts on the ZenBook Pro Duo, with the solid points and the quirks, so you’ll know if this is the right choice for you or not. The dual-screens are this laptop’s main selling factor, and you’ll actually find them useful as you incorporate them in your daily use experience, but they are also backed up by a premium construction, beefy hardware specs, pretty good IO and a fast keyboard. Surprisingly, it grew on me the more I used it. In all fairness, though, I was reluctant of this form-factor at first, giving our past experience with the similarly designed ROG Zephyrus lines. I reviewed the top-spec model, with a Core i9-9980HK backed up by 32GB of RAM, which is more than enough for even fairly demanding work, and unsurprisingly it pretty much breezed through our benchmarking.Asus calls this “The laptop of tomorrow”. So it’s a bit of a brute, and the second screen (mostly) works, but does the ZenBook Pro Duo deliver where it counts? Specs: Like it or not, this is what peak performance looks like

It’s available in dark blue (‘Celestial Blue’) finish with pretty minimal detailing, with both the Asus logo and its concentric circle finish offset slightly on the aluminium body. The Asus ErgoLift hinge design returns, naturally propping the base of the body up at a slight angle – ideal for both cooling and comfortable typing – and beyond the silly screen the rest of the design is actually very restrained. The tone of the audio is strong, with a nice balanced sound profile, but max volume is actually a little lower than I’d have thought, and I found myself cranking things up higher than I usually ever would.

Zenbook pro duo full#

Still, given the intended use case it’s odd that there’s not even a MicroSD card slot, let alone full SD, while limiting it to a single USB-C slot and no ethernet at all means you might still need to cart a dongle round anyway.Īs is standard for Asus laptops these days, sound is provided by Harmon/Kardon, though I found it unexpectedly weedy. You get two full-size USB ports, one USB-C, and one HDMI, along with a dedicated power port – Asus still hasn’t jumped onto the USB-C charging bandwagon, sadly. One advantage of the heft is that it does leave Asus space for plenty of ports, though the potential does feel a little wasted. Portability clearly wasn’t the priority here, and while it’s still just shy of the biggest gaming devices out there, there are plenty of other premium creative laptops from the likes of Apple or Dell that offer similar performance with a slimmer build. Between the top-end specs and the extra display, this thing is thicc, and it’s got the weight to match at 2.5kg (5.5lbs) – an ultrabook this ain’t.

Zenbook pro duo portable#

I’d recommend investing in a portable mouse. The track pad is great too, and I quickly adapted to having it next to rather than below the keyboard, but you just can’t get away from the fact that it’s seriously small, and that may be a compromise too far for some. The keyboard itself is pretty comfortable to use at least, with a tactile, responsive feel, good-sized keys (no compromise for space there), and a comfortable 1.4mm travel distance. With a secondary display built into the main body, the ZenBook Pro Duo is built for multi-tasking and heavy duty creative work – think Apple’s MacBook Pro Touch Bar on steroids – but that brings with it design changes and compromises that you’re likely to either love or hate. Thanks to a 4K OLED main panel and RTX 2060 GPU backed by up to 32GB of RAM and a Core i9, the specs are about as premium as it gets, making this a veritable portable powerhouse. You can usually rely on Asus to come up with something a little different for its laptops, and Computex 2019 was no different: the company unveiled what it calls the future of laptops: the ZenBook Pro Duo, a high-end creative device that boasts not one, but two 4K displays. This isn’t perfect, and future dual-screen devices will find better ways to make the form factor work. The question is how much you’re willing to compromise to get it, with rubbish battery life and a giant chassis. This may or may not be the future of laptops, but for creatives, multi-taskers, and the attentionally challenged, the second display quickly makes a case for itself. Don’t write the ZenBook Pro Duo off as a mere novelty without trying it.