Conceptually, it’s very near what Lenovo did final 12 months with the Yoga E-book 9i, full with shorthand gestures that assist you pull up a digital keyboard or touchpad, broaden the display screen to fill each shows or “flick” content material from one display screen to the opposite. That is all pretty straightforward to get the cling of. For essentially the most half, working with the Zenbook Duo is not any completely different than working with two screens on a regular PC.
Many prior dual-screen laptops suffered on the efficiency entrance, and whereas the Duo didn’t set any data, it’s completely succesful throughout a large spectrum of benchmarks. Enterprise apps load and run shortly, and graphical capabilities are acceptable regardless of the dearth of a discrete graphics processor. Even AI-oriented efficiency was moderately good (once more, contemplating there’s no GPU to spice up it). If there’s a draw back, it’s battery life. I obtained simply 6 hours and 48 minutes of YouTube run time with one display screen lively, and that fell to five hours and 13 minutes with each dwell. Neither rating is all that nice.
The muscle behind that is an Intel Core Extremely 9 185H CPU with 32 GB of RAM and a 1-terabyte solid-state drive. The port choice is okay, if a bit restricted, that includes two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, one USB-A port, and a full-size HDMI output jack.
The Zenbook Duo is pretty compact given its design, at 25 mm thick with or with out the keyboard sandwiched within the center. The whole package deal weighs 3.5 kilos, or 2.8 kilos with out the keyboard. That’s a bit on the heavy facet, which is to be anticipated, however lower than some conventional 14-inch laptops I’ve examined previously couple of years.
Whereas the dual-screen idea continues to enhance, it’s not with out some lingering rising pains. I encountered occasional hiccups the place the screens didn’t reorient from portrait to panorama robotically. And the unit had the identical drawback with third-party chargers that I encountered with Asus’ Zenbook 14 OLED, dropping out of plugged-in mode and switching to battery energy and again, nearly randomly.
{Photograph}: Asus
My largest grievance nevertheless is design-related. Not like the Yoga E-book 9i, the Duo’s screens aren’t flush with one another when the display screen is opened flat. As an alternative, one sits greater than a centimeter behind the opposite, making a staggered, stairstep impact. This displeases the OCD facet of my mind, which insists that side-by-side screens be aligned on the identical aircraft.
That mentioned, having two screens does change the sport relating to cellular productiveness, even when they’re a bit cattywampus. I’m used to engaged on twin screens in my day by day life after I’m desk-bound, however after I’m on the highway and must shift to working immediately off a single laptop computer show, my productiveness vanishes.
The Duo has a price ticket of $1,700—and that’s for the totally loaded configuration. That’s not precisely low cost, however it’s far inexpensive than most different dual-screen laptops and even aggressive with many who have a single show. Finally, I’m hard-pressed to discover a motive to not advocate this gadget in case you’re in any respect like me, discovering {that a} single, small display screen fences you in and slows you down.
