ASUS ZENBOOK 14
This 13-inch form factor ultrabook has a 14-inch display and a second touchscreen trackpad, but is this dual-display more trouble than it’s worth?
Maybe it’s the emergence of dual-screen smartphones or a realisation that lots of people use dual-screen workstations, but either way Asus’ laptop division seems fixated on inserting a second screen wherever it can on its latest devices.
We tested out a Zenbook Duo recently and were pleasantly surprised by the usefulness of the oversized touchbar/second touchscreen, so we were actually looking forward to testing out the ZenBook 14 UX434FL with the trackpad-touchscreen combo interface. After a bit of use we learned that excitement was the incorrect emotion to have for this configuration – the correct one would’ve been dread.
On the Duo the second screen is the same width and the same horizontal resolution as the main display and it directly abuts the bottom edge of the primary screen, which makes for a convenient transition from one screen to the other. On the Zenbook 14 however, the second screen is trackpad sized and exists in the trackpad’s usual location in front of the keyboard, which means that apps are sometimes annoyingly resized or weirdly arranged and moving things between the screens feels disconnected and inconvenient. Or, at least it would be if you could see it. The thing is, that second screen is almost entirely obscured by your hand whenever you’re using the trackpad... so basically always.
Even though the screen isn’t ideal as a computer display, it is smartphone sized, so it could theoretically house apps that display information or add convenience. Asus definitely tried to consider this, but unfortunately, it didn’t stick the landing. The touchpad apps include mostly useless Office tools, unwanted security software, and a suite of MyAsus bloatware. Apart from the pushy McAfee security software (which entirely roadblocked use of the trackpad whenever it wanted) most of these apps are benign enough to ignore, except that in order to access them you have to disable trackpad usage, and for some reason Asus configured the software so this happens regularly, whether you want it to or not. Oh and the trackpad also crashes whenever the laptop is under a heavy load.
The complete failure of this trackpad is somewhat disappointing since the rest of the physical design is nice. The clamshell is wrapped in a full metal casing that buckles at the folded edge to prop the back of the keyboard up on a 4-degree incline. It’s also got a bright FullHD 14-inch display with 6.45mm bezels and an 86% screen to body ratio. The ZenBook 14 UX434FL we tested had a powerful quad-core Intel Core i7-8565U CPU with 16GB of RAM and a super fast Gen 2 1TB PCIe SSD.
The Core i7-8565U is a powerful ultrabook processor that’ll churn through work tasks and the device also has a discrete Nvidia GeForce MX150 2GB GPU so it’s okay at very light gaming with a 10-20% performance bump on 10th gen integrated Intel and AMD graphics processors. With a pretty average four hour and 10 minute PCMark 8 battery life, this ZenBook 14 really isn’t a bad ultrabook… apart from the trackpad.