Sarah Tew/CNET
It appears 2019 is popping into the 12 months of the twin display. However whereas firms like HP are simply coming round, Asus has already marched on to its second technology. Its new flagship ZenBook Professional Duo pairs a 15-inch 4K OLED show with a second full-width IPS contact display above the keyboard, which Asus dubs “ScreenPad Plus.”
Technically, the laptop computer has three screens for those who rely the digital quantity pad-slash-touchpad, however let’s not get carried away.
Asus has additionally up to date the smaller ScreenPads in its normal ZenBook and VivoBook fashions with the ScreenPad 2. Should you missed it, Asus first launched the ScreenPad in final 12 months’s ZenBook Professional 15; simply think about a laptop computer with a trackpad that doubles as a telephone display and you’ve got a good suggestion of what Asus goes for.
The ScreenPad 2 featured on new VivoBook S and ZenBook computer systems has minimally bigger panels — about half an inch alongside the diagonal — however eat rather a lot much less energy, do not dim if you’re unplugged and have software program that is a little bit extra intuitive to make use of.
The Zenbook Professional Duo’s ScreenPad Plus is unquestionably the flashier one. It has the identical horizontal decision and width as the primary display (4K) however roughly half the depth, which makes the diagonal size actually lengthy. Thus Asus refers to it as a “14-inch” display though it isn’t what we sometimes consider as a 14-inch show.
And it capabilities identical to a second hooked up display would, with the power to tile home windows on it or vertically span a single window. Each screens have contact functionality, so you possibly can transfer home windows from one to a different along with your finger or with the onscreen cursor. It comes loaded with Asus apps, although you can too add third social gathering apps like Netflix, Spotify, Fb and so forth.
Impressively, you possibly can have as much as three home windows on the second display directly. You may also prolong a window in the primary display to the secondary one, so for example your Fb feed will scroll down from one display to the subsequent. Asus touts the Duo as the final word machine for creatives, which implies it’s going to doubtless have assist for Adobe packages and people of an analogous ilk.
To accomodate for the twin screens, Asus pushed the trackpad to the appropriate of the keyboard. That is paying homage to its ROG Zephyrus gaming laptops, the place the trackpad placement has been conspicuous to say the least.
The Professional Duo incorporates Asus’ steepest ergolift hinge so far, 7 levels. That places the second display at a extra helpful angle than if it was simply mendacity flat. Plus, because the the brand new specs go as much as an Intel Ninth-gen i9 processor and GeForce RTX 2060, it most likely wants the additional airflow to maintain cool. It does have a hotkey to change among the many numerous energy profiles.
Two screens means the trackpad, which doubles as a quantity pad, will get shirked to the appropriate of the keyboard.
Sarah Tew/CNET
Asus additionally introduced a less expensive model of the laptop computer, the Asus ZenBook Duo (no Professional). It has a 14-inch essential show and a 12.6-inch secondary display, each of that are a Full-HD 1,920×1,080 (versus the 4K 15.6-inch and 14-inch shows of the Professional). Somewhat than a RTX 2060, it comes with a much less highly effective GeForce MX250 GPU and maxes out at an Intel Core i7 CPU.
Although the Duos look modern, these shows add fairly a little bit of weight — it is about 5.5 kilos. Based mostly on our temporary time with the Professional Duo at Computex, the second show works properly and is a dazzlingly sharp and daring try to meaningfully evolve the age-old laptop computer design. The sacrifices to realize that embody the elimination of palm rests, a barely crammed keyboard and the trackpad being shifted to the appropriate.
You will get used to a decent keyboard, however it could be more durable to forgive an ill-placed trackpad. We’ll discover out for positive after we ultimately evaluation this promising laptop computer. Asus says the Duo laptops can be obtainable in Q3.
Watch this:
The twin-screen Asus ZenBook Professional 15 has us seeing double
1:38
