ASUS ZenBook Flip UX461UA
Does this new 2-in-1 offer the best of both the tablet and laptop worlds?
The only PC category that’s still seeing substantial growth seems to be 2-in-1s, with detachables and convertibles continuing to steal a lot of customers from the shrinking tablet market. From a consumer perspective, we guess it makes some sense to put a bit of extra money into a laptop to gain the ability to also use it as a tablet — and in some cases, also net you a faster SSD, a more powerful CPU or even, in some cases, a dedicated GPU for better gaming.
ASUS’s 1.4kg ZenBook Flip UX461U, is perhaps not quite as comfortable to use in tablet mode as a detachable or a straight-up slate, but for people who will only use the tablet form occasionally, it does perform adequately as a tablet. There are caveats, with that 14-inch size meaning it’s a little too big to easily hold with one hand (even though it’s light for a laptop, it’s about double the weight of your average high-powered slate) and, as with all 2-in-1s that use this folded form factor, it’s a little jarring that your supporting-hand has to cling to keyboard keys. The included 1,024pressure-point stylus and the fully foldable design do make it good as a desktop slate or drawing display, however, which does somewhat help make up for the less-than-ideal handheld tablet experience.
As a laptop, the Flip looks and feels great, sharing the premium concentric brushed-metal casing of the broader ZenBook line and keeping its compact form factor at an impressivelyslim 1.39cm thickness. There’s some clever engineering in the hinge design which folds to give the keyboard face a comfortable typing incline without thickening the overall body design, and although it lacks a built-in Ethernet port, just about every other interface you’d want is there, including an HDMI-out, one Type-C and two Type-A USB 3.1 ports, a microSD card slot and a 3.5mm headphone socket.
That foldable facade conceals a mobile series Core i7-8550U CPU (or, in its cheaper iteration, an Intel Core i5-8250U) that is thermally serviced by a single, edge-mounted vent left of the keyboard. This was accompanied by 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SanDisk M.2 SSD (connected via the SATA 6Gbps interface) on the model we tested. This is a powerful configuration for a nearly tablet-sized setup, and the new 8th-generation Intel CPU showed a 10% performance boost on last year’s Toshiba Portégé X20W-D (which runs on a Core i7-7600 CPU with the same amount of RAM) in PCMark 8’s Home generalproductivity benchmark. The Flip manages to last a full 7 hours during video playback tests on balanced power settings, too.
While its CPU is a top bit of kit, a growing selection of premium ultrabooks are beginning to offer dedicated GPUs, so you’ll want to be sure that you prefer the tablet features over being able to lightly game, mine cryptocurrency or 3D model anything. There’s just an integrated Intel UHD Graphics 620 chip here, which is outperformed by entry-level dedicated GPUs.
Thankfully, the price of the Flip is competitive. It undercuts the similarly specced HP Spectre x360 convertible by about $500.
If you’re looking for a laptop that you’ll need to use as a tablet on occasion, then the Zenbook Flip UX461UA is the best value 2-in-1 we’ve come across.