Asus Zenbook Duo (2024) Review: A Two-Screened Laptop That Nails It Leave a comment

Conceptually, it’s very near what Lenovo did final 12 months with the Yoga Book 9i, full with shorthand gestures that provide help to pull up a digital keyboard or touchpad, broaden the display to fill each shows or “flick” content material from one display to the opposite. That is all pretty simple to get the grasp of. For probably the most half, working with the Zenbook Duo is not any totally different than working with two monitors on a standard PC.

Many prior dual-screen laptops suffered on the efficiency entrance, and whereas the Duo didn’t set any data, it’s completely succesful throughout a large spectrum of benchmarks. Enterprise apps load and run rapidly, and graphical capabilities are acceptable regardless of the dearth of a discrete graphics processor. Even AI-oriented efficiency was fairly good (once more, contemplating there’s no GPU to spice up it). If there’s a draw back, it’s battery life. I received simply 6 hours and 48 minutes of YouTube run time with one display energetic, and that fell to five hours and 13 minutes with each stay. Neither rating is all that nice.

The muscle behind that is an Intel Core Extremely 9 185H CPU with 32 GB of RAM and a 1-terabyte solid-state drive. The port choice is ok, if a bit restricted, that includes two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, one USB-A port, and a full-size HDMI output jack.

The Zenbook Duo is pretty compact given its design, at 25 mm thick with or with out the keyboard sandwiched within the center. The whole bundle weighs 3.5 kilos, or 2.8 kilos with out the keyboard. That’s a bit on the heavy facet, which is to be anticipated, however lower than some conventional 14-inch laptops I’ve examined prior to now couple of years.

Whereas the dual-screen idea continues to enhance, it’s not with out some lingering rising pains. I encountered occasional hiccups the place the screens didn’t reorient from portrait to panorama routinely. And the unit had the identical downside with third-party chargers that I encountered with Asus’ Zenbook 14 OLED, dropping out of plugged-in mode and switching to battery energy and again, nearly randomly.

My greatest criticism nonetheless is design-related. In contrast to the Yoga E-book 9i, the Duo’s screens aren’t flush with one another when the display is opened flat. As a substitute, one sits greater than a centimeter behind the opposite, making a staggered, stairstep impact. This displeases the OCD facet of my mind, which insists that side-by-side screens be aligned on the identical airplane.

That mentioned, having two screens does change the sport on the subject of cell productiveness, even when they’re a little bit cattywampus. I’m used to engaged on twin screens in my each day life once I’m desk-bound, however once I’m on the highway and must shift to working instantly off a single laptop computer show, my productiveness vanishes.

The Duo has a price ticket of $1,700—and that’s for the totally loaded configuration. That’s not precisely low cost, but it surely’s far cheaper than most different dual-screen laptops and even aggressive with many who have a single show. Finally, I’m hard-pressed to discover a motive to not suggest this system for those who’re in any respect like me, discovering {that a} single, small display fences you in and slows you down.