Asus ZenBook Flip S UX371EA
A gorgeous convertible laptop that competes with the Dell XPS 13 but falls short in the end
SCORE
PRICE £1,499 (£1,799 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk
OLED screens are common on TVs and phones, but they’re a rarity in laptops. The reasons are understandable: OLED screens are typically more expensive to manufacture than IPS screens, which can bump up the price for consumers. Their higher power draw will also drag battery life down.
While the ZenBook’s £1,799 price may make it seem like you’re paying a huge premium for OLED, it’s around the same as you’d pay for a Dell XPS 13 ( see issue 317, p50) with the equivalent hardware spec. That’s especially true when you consider that the display is touch-compatible and, thanks to a 360˚ hinge, it can be folded back into “tent” mode and used as a large tablet if you want to scribble on the screen with the bundled stylus.
There’s no hiding from the main event: the 4K (3,840 x 2,160) resolution OLED display. It’s an absolute beauty. It’s bright, reaching a peak luminance of 460cd/m2, while its perfect contrast (an inherent property of OLED) means it’s a fabulous display to stream TV shows and films. Bear in mind that you’ll need to jump through the usual hoops to enable HDR properly before it will look its best, though.
Technically speaking, it’s a zinger. The panel reproduced a huge 121% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut with coverage of 99%, and its colour accuracy is decent as well. However, you must make sure you choose the correct option from the presets provided in the MyAsus software.
“Vivid” is the most eye-popping, but select
“Normal” if you want the best colour accuracy: here we saw an average Delta E of 1.74.
The display might steal the headlines, but the Flip S is no one-trick pony. It looks the part of a luxury laptop, with gleaming brushed-bronze chamfered edges trimming the base and spine, contrasting nicely with a matte-black finish surrounding the keyboard and a “spun” brushed aluminium finish on the lid. Despite the 360˚ hinge, it’s extremely slim and light, weighing only 1.2kg and measuring a slender 13.9mm at its thickest point. Asus also squeezes in a 720p Windows Hellocompatible webcam (as ever, don’t expect super-high quality).
The backlit, Scrabble-tile keys have a depth of travel that I didn’t anticipate from such a slim laptop, while the touchpad is broad, sensitive and accurate. The latter also has an extra trick up its sleeve: hold your finger in the top-right corner and the surface of the touch touchpad lights up, transforming into a touch-sensitive number pad.
Asus again goes off the beaten track with its selection select of physical connectio connections: you get a full-sized HDM HDMI 1.4 video output, a pair of USB-C Thunderbolt Thunderbol 4 ports and a USB-A 3.2 3 port. Weirdly, ther there’s no 3.5mm jack (although (althou Asus does include a USB-C-to-3.5mm a audio adapter in the box). box) An Intel AX201 chip takes ta care of Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 connectivity.
There’s only one model to choose from: it com comes with an 11th-generation Intel Core i7 i7-1165G7 1165G7 CPU with integrated Iris Xe graphics, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. Despite having the same processor as the XPS 13 we tested two months ago, the
Flip S performs significantly worse
“The ZenBook Flip S has a jaw-dropping display, looks slick and offers more flexibility in how you use it compared with its rivals”
overall. This is mainly due to poor thermal management: as soon as you put the ZenBook under stress, the temperature of the CPU cores skyrockets and performance drops off a cliff. While running a video conversion, the CPU maxed out at 99˚C, even with the fan mode at its highest setting.
Battery life also suffers. Although the Flip S has a higher capacity battery than the XPS 13 at 67Wh versus 52Wh, it simply doesn’t last as long between charges. In our video-rundown test, the Flip S lasted only 7hrs 18mins. That’s not horrendous, but it falls a long way short of the current standard for 11th-generation Core i7 laptops of around 12 hours, with the Dell lasting for 11hrs 57mins. This suggests that you’re paying the price for that OLED screen in a lack of stamina.
Had the Asus
ZenBook Flip S posted better battery life and sustained performance scores, I’d have been inclined to sing its praises. It has a jaw-dropping display, looks slick and offers greater flexibility in how you use it compared ed with its rivals. However, it falls significantly short in other ther important areas. Compromised omised cooling means that performance isn’t all it could ld be and the powerhungry ungry OLED screen leads to o mediocre battery life. Put ut simply, for a laptop that hat costs the better part of f two grand, I’d expect much, much more.
SPECIFICATIONS IFICATIONS
Four-core re 2.8GHz Intel Core i7-1165G7 6 processor Intel Iris Xe graphics 16GB B LPDD4RX RAM 13.3in touchscreen OLED ED display, 3,840 x 2,160 resolution 1TB NVMe PCIe SSD 2x2 Wi-Fi 6 Bluetooth 5.1 2 x Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) USB-A 3.2 HDMI 720p webcam stylus USB-C-to-3.5mm audio adapter 67Wh battery Windows 10 Pro 305 x 211 x 11.9-13.9mm (WDH) 1.2kg