Credit: Adam Patrick Murray/IDG
In the race to make dual screens a must-have laptop feature, Asus just did the equivalent of asking the competition to hold its beer. Because, damn, if you want an impressive dual-screen laptop, how do you beat the ZenBook Pro Duo? This engineering marvel somehow manages to jam a 15.6-inch screen and a 14-inch screen into a 5.5 lbs laptop.
Yes, we’ll say that again: The ZenBook Pro Duo features two screens, including one that’s 14 inches diagonal and occupies the entire space above the keyboard.
Asus
With its 14-inch touch-enabled secondary screen, the Asus ZenBook Pro laughs at laptops with puny 6-inch auxilary screens.
The auxiliary panel’s resolution is 3840x1100 with an aspect ratio of 32:9. The horizontal resolution of the auxiliary panel matches the main panel’s 4K horizontal so you can drag windows between the two screens effortlessly. The main panel itself is a gorgeous 15.6-inch, HDR OLED 4K screen.
Both screens are also touch-enabled for normal Windows operations. The second panel also includes a set of fairly well-polished controls. Asus dubs it the “4K ScreenPad Plus.”
Adam Patrick Murray/IDGThe laptop is primarily aimed at power users so its insides are top notch. The laptop offers Intel’s 8-core Core i9-9980HK or a 6-core Core i7-9750H. For GPU you get a GeForce RTX 2060, and up to 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. Asus said it will come standard with Intel’s newest WiFi-6/802.11ax controller.
The battery in the ZenBook Pro Duo is decently sized at 70 watt hours, so battery life will at least be decent for the amount of hardware it has inside.
As the third production dual-screen laptop we’ve seen in the last year, we’ll say that it’s probably most impressive of the bunch. We recently played with HP’s impressive Omen X 2S, which claimed the mantle of first gaming dual-screen laptop.
The HP includes some unique software touches for the second panel, but the ZenBook Pro Duo is simply a head turner. With the 11-inch ScreenPad Plus, it should be far more usable for its intended audience: content creators.
The ScreenPad Plus also has pen support so you can write on the auxiliary screen. Although we didn’t try it, it’s a nice touch and could come in handy.
Pricing and availability wasn’t announced, but the number of systems Asus had on display pretty much telegraphs that this is a real product that’s about to hit.
Asus
