ASUS ZENBOOK PRO DUO

PRICE To be confirmed AVAILABILITY To be confirmed

Several days before Intel did its big reveal of concept dual-screen laptops ( see p40), Asus was showing off the real thing at a private demo. I spent around half an hour playing with the two variants of the ZenBook Duo: one is the plain 14in ZenBook Duo, the other a 15.6in ZenBook Pro Duo. And what curious creatures they are. In a piece of bold one-upmanship versus the Apple MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar, the ZenBook Duo’s second screens are full-resolution affairs. In fact, they exactly copy the resolution of the main screen (Full HD in the ZenBook’s case, 4K for the ZenBook Pro). Why? Well, that’s a good question, but Asus did come up with a number of scenarios. Let’s say you’re coding. You might have your IDE on the left-hand side and the result-in-progress on the right. Or, if you’re editing audio, you could use the secondary display for controls and settings, much like a mixing desk. Or if you’re researching a trip, you could have Google Maps on the secondary screen while actively searching places on the main display. I did spot some early problems, with one being that the two screens were different colour temperatures – this makes spreading windows vertically off-putting, as your eye doesn’t seamlessly read down from one to the other. Naturally, you must also cope with the keyboard being relegated to an unnatural position, but Asus hopes to counter that with an optional palmrest. Suffice to say I’m extremely keen to put this idea to the test.