Almost every major computer manufacturer has dabbled with the idea of a dual-screen laptop at one point or another. in 2011, it features not one, but two 14-inch displays. Then at CES 2017, Razer showed up This brought the panel count to three before showing something a little less extravagant a year later . Fast forward to 2020, when Dell dazzles us . Even Apple preferred this category to the old one only to reverse the course and .
At the same time, Lenovo has a whole family of devices left behind from the original and culminates in recent times , the latter is extremely close to making the promise of dual-screen laptops a truly compelling option. But now, after several generations of their devices, ASUS has brought it all together It’s a super-sleek machine with two screens that’s slightly larger than a similar-sized clamshell. There’s also a removable keyboard and a built-in kickstand for maximum customization. Starting at $1,500, the Zenbook Duo doesn’t charge a huge premium for something with a ton of extra benefits. So, while it’s been quite a journey to get here, ASUS has finally made a dual-screen laptop that proves once and for all that two screens are better than one.
Photo: Sam Rutherford/Engadget
Starting at $1,500 and not much bigger than a traditional clamshell, ASUS’ Zenbook Duo is the first dual-screen laptop you’ll really want to buy.
- Elegant design
- Beautiful screens
- Built-in stand
- Good port selection
- Solid battery life
- It is slightly more expensive than traditional shell
- Windows 11 is still not optimized for laptops with two screens
Design
One of the most impressive things about the Zenbook Duo is that it doesn’t look like some sort of Frankendeivce. It’s just a regular-looking 14-inch laptop. Even after you open it up, things still look normal with the physical keyboard and touchpad, not to mention a healthy selection of ports on the outside (two Thunderbolt 4, one USB 3.2 Type-A, and a full-sized HDMI 2.1 slot). A small part of me wishes ASUS would find room for some kind of SD card reader, but I understand there isn’t any.
It’s only after you remove the keyboard that things get interesting, because as soon as you do, the Duo’s second display comes to life. You have a ton of options from here. A three-finger tap on the bottom panel invokes the floating touchpad. Alternatively, eight fingers reveal a virtual keyboard, which you can slide up to reveal a traditional keyboard/trackpad combo. But interestingly, since these are all virtual stand-ins, it’s easy to switch to a new layout (as for other languages), move the touchpad to the side, or call the digital pad if you need to enter data. . There’s more flexibility when half of the laptop’s interior isn’t taken up by a set of rigid physical keys.
But things keep getting better, as the bottom of the Duo has a flap that converts into a stand. This allows you to power up the system and use both screens as proper displays, like a portable dual monitor setup, but all in one standalone system. Since the detachable keyboard connects wirelessly via Bluetooth, you can place it on the front (or wherever) like a desktop. The one small downside to this design is that if you flip the Duo’s displays into a side-by-side portrait orientation, the stand’s design means there’s no way to adjust how much it tilts. This greatly favors a stacked setup with a display on top, which is good because I think the arrangement is more useful in most cases.
Another pleasant surprise is that for a device with two screens, the Zenbook Duo is no bigger or heavier than a typical clamshell. It weighs 3.6 pounds and is 0.78 inches thick, compared to 2.82 pounds and 0.59 inches for the standard Zenbook 14 OLED. When compared to something like the Dell XPS 14 (3.7 pounds and 0.71 inches thick), both systems are practically the same size.
My one complaint is that ASUS’ dark gray finish doesn’t help the Duo stand out. It’s almost like someone who wears subdued colors so as not to attract attention. But this design is fantastic and I wish ASUS would give this laptop (and the engineers behind it) the flowers it deserves.
Screens and software
The centerpiece of the Duo is its twin 14-inch displays, which are sure to please. Compatible OLED panels not only offer strong brightness (around 500 nits) but also deliver rich and accurate colors (100 percent of DCI-P3). But the real magic is when you use both panels together.
Moving apps from one display to another is as simple as dragging and dropping or using the appropriate menus that appear at the top of the screen. Additionally, there’s a floating button on the lower left for ASUS’ ScreenXpert software, which provides shortcuts to adjust brightness (individually or in pairs), disable custom panels, or pull up handy widgets for things like the control panel and handwriting recognition tool. does. , news and weather and more. If the goal was to get a lot of value out of the Duo’s two displays, I think ASUS’ software does a pretty good job.
The downside to all of this is that despite ASUS’ best efforts, Windows 11 and many apps are still not fully optimized for systems like this. For example, when I play a round Team battle tactics and I wanted to draw some game statistics on the lower display, I ran into a problem where the virtual touchpad stopped working. Only after putting the game in borderless windowed mode, closing the game and restarting everything did it start again. True, such cases were rare, but it is important to remember that when using a state-of-the-art device, there may be some errors or awkward interactions.
Performance
The Zenbook Duo comes with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB NVMe SSD. Although you can upgrade it with double the memory and a faster Ultra 9 chip, I found the base configuration to be very fast. In tests like Geekbench 6 and PCMark 10, the Zenbook Duo delivered identical results, including similarly equipped enclosures. . This is great because it means that adding a second screen and even dragging apps from one display to another when set up in desktop mode isn’t a huge burden as it looks fast and responsive. The obvious drawback is that, unlike some 14-inch systems like the XPS 14, there’s no room for a discrete GPU, making the Zenbook Duo more suited to general productivity than more demanding tasks like video editing.
Battery life
You might think that a system with two screens would have battery power, but the Zenbook Duo fared better than expected. With just one screen, it lasted 13 hours and 12 minutes in our video summary test, which is almost on par with the Zenbook 14 OLED (12:43) (a touch longer, actually). And with both screens running, the Duo’s time dropped to just 10:17, enough to survive an entire workday.
Collection
Well, so the Zenbook Duo delivers on the promise of dual-screen laptops. But I ask a lot of questions, who are such devices really for? The most obvious application is for people who carry a portable monitor around while traveling. But more generally, this thing is aimed at anyone who appreciates multiple monitors and wants a system that can recreate that experience in a more travel-friendly way, which is something the Zenbook Duo humbly does. The best part is that it doesn’t make huge sacrifices for it, because thanks to its removable keyboard, it can work like any other enclosure when space is tight (like an airplane).
When you have room to spread out, it becomes a portable workstation with plenty of screen space for a project above and bonus real estate for Slack, email, video calls, or whatever else you might need below. It has ample ports, so you don’t need to carry a dongle around, and thanks to its beautiful OLED screens, your work (or game) always looks great. Zenbook Duo can do everything a traditional laptop can do and more. Yes, the software experience could be a little more polished, though it’s not entirely ASUS. We still need a new version of Windows to provide better OS support for dual-screen machines. But for all the trouble and multiple generations to get here, the Zenbook Duo is a wonderful torchbearer for a new class of portable computers.
