Asus ZenBook Duo

INNOVATION IS VITAL

within the tech industry; many products live or die based on their USPs or next-gen features, and hardware that fails to innovate frequently fails to excite, too. Asus wants to grab the innovation points with this laptop, the Duo edition of its ZenBook line. Calling it a dual-screen laptop isn’t fully accurate; it’s more like a regular laptop with a super-powered touchbar, giving you instant fingertip control.

Asus has given it a funky name, of course: the ScreenPad Plus. It does act as an extension of the upper screen, so you can pull open tabs down to the second display, but it also rocks a custom UI for quick access to useful programs. The keyboard is at the base of the chassis, and makes for a very comfortable typing experience, while the trackpad is squeezed to one side.

Internally, a 10th-gen Intel CPU and discrete graphics card (Nvidia’s MX250) mean that the Duo can handle whatever work you throw at it, and it comes with up to 16GB of RAM and a high-speed 1TB SSD. There’s the usual suite of modern laptop additions here, too, from a Windows-Hello-enabled IR camera setup to Harman Kardon certified audio that results in impressive sound for such a small laptop. The built-in Cortana and Alexa support work fantastically, too.

1 STAY CONNECTED

Connectivity is definitely the ZenBook Duo’s strong point, because every model comes equipped with superfast Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5. Physical connectivity is just as good as wireless; two USB-A ports and a USB-C port are joined by an HDMI connector for attaching a second (third?) monitor.

CLEAR COLOR

2

The LED-backlit display is a fairly standard 1080p panel, but the 100 percent sRGB means colors are vibrant. With a slender bezel, the screen looks great, and wideview tech brings a 178degree viewing angle to the main display and the ScreenPad Plus.

3 TOUCH AND GO

The ScreenPad Plus comes with a set of apps designed to be used on the slender lower screen, all accessible with a few quick taps. Most useful is a numpad app, as the Duo lacks a physical numpad, but we also like the Spotify app, perfect for keeping control of your tunes while you work on the top screen.