Double-screened beast: Too much up top for one lap
Asus device scores points for quirk but not usability
Taiwan is a fantastic, modern country with excellent food and mountain biking, and it can also be a very quirky and eccentric place.
Some of that quirk rubs off on Taiwanese computer designs which is kind of cool, because if you’ve seen one Windows PC you’ve seen them all usually. Not so with the Asus ZenBook Pro Duo portable PC that I had for the lockdown, and which has not one 4K touch screen but two built in. It wins in the unusual stakes, but not so much in the usability department.
Dual-screen laptops have been on the cards for a while now, but have turned out difficult to get right. During the Steve Ballmer era, Microsoft put together the Courier prototype that was a clamshell type laptop.
Courier never made it into production, but I expected Apple to make a really thin iPad or MacBook with a dualscreen set up with haptic buzzing to emulate a keyboard without any physical keys. Apple did that with its excellent MacBook trackpad which doesn’t have any moving parts.
Maybe it was just too complicated even for Apple, maybe they’re waiting for foldable screens, or there’s some other reason that I haven’t thought of and which makes the whole thing a bad idea — but all we got was the Touch Bar strip on the pricier MacBook Pros.
The Touch Bar kind of works, but it has no haptic vibration feature to provide feedback for your fingers, so you have to look down at the keys you’re pressing — which also change depending on the application that’s active. After a few years of trying to get used to it, I still only poke it rarely to adjust volume and other settings, and to accidentally hit the ESC key.
I had to remove the Siri key from the Touch Bar for that reason, as it was just too distracting to have the personal digital assistant pop up at random as you miss the delete key just a tiny bit.
Asus ZenBook Pro Duo came out last year, and features 15.6-inch and 14-inch 4K OLED screens next to each other. The top screen especially has great image quality. There’s some serious hardware inside the machine: the screens are driven by a very fast GeForce RTX 2060 graphics adapter with 6 gigabytes of memory and the model I had was loaded with 32GB of main memory and 1 terabyte of storage. That’s enough for just about any computing task, from graphics and video editing to heavy duty gaming.
With the screens and builtin hardware, the ZenBook Pro Duo is huge and heavy at 2.5kg.
It’s not a laptop due to the size and heft, and it gets hot too thanks to a crazy powerful Intel Core i9 “Coffee Lake” processor that can turbo up its eight physical and 16 virtual cores to 5 GHz speeds.
Chunky portables like the ZenBook Pro Duo are destined for desks, especially since the battery didn’t last more than two to three hours between charges, despite 71 Watt-hours capacity. Asus claims up to 71⁄ hours battery life but that’s with less memory and the second display turned off.
Maybe the idea behind the ZenBook Pro Duo was to integrate a two-monitor set-up into a single device, and it’s definitely impressive from an engineering point of view.
It’s easy to make a business case for a powerful computer that handles complex tasks faster, and big, high-res screens for better image quality and more space for apps and data.
But, that second screen doesn’t seem all that useful. It isn’t well supported by Windows 10 apps, and they can get confused when moving them between displays. Asus has written a small set of apps and controls for the second screen, and there’s a Spotify player in there too.
Since the bottom screen features 1024-level pressure sensitivity, that’s the one you’d use the supplied Asus pen to draw on. Again, it kind of works but having a drawing pad or tablet next to the computer is more natural as resting your hand on the keyboard as you use the pen feels weird.
Also, it’s a shame there’s no haptics option for a better feel when the pen moves across the glass. Having to look away from the top screen and down on the second one slows you as well.
Another consequence of the second screen is that there’s nowhere to rest your wrists while typing, which is uncomfortable as the keyboard is high up. Instead, you need to make the ZenBook Pro Duo even bigger with the supplied detachable wrist-rest.
Ergonomically, the ZenBook Pro Duo isn’t the best but even if you could live with that and its bulk, dropping $5600 or thereabouts on the device for double screens doesn’t offer any compelling advantage, especially for business use.
I’d keep the great 15.6-inch top display and the powerful hardware, and buy another Asus model without the second screen, especially if it offers better battery life and lighter weight.