Conceptually, it’s very near what Lenovo did final yr with the Yoga E-book 9i, full with shorthand gestures that show you how to pull up a digital keyboard or touchpad, develop 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 hold of. For essentially the most half, working with the Zenbook Duo isn’t any completely different than working with two displays on an ordinary 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 rapidly, and graphical capabilities are acceptable regardless of the dearth of a discrete graphics processor. Even AI-oriented efficiency was fairly good (once more, contemplating there’s no GPU to spice up it). If there’s a draw back, it’s battery life. I acquired simply 6 hours and 48 minutes of YouTube run time with one display screen energetic, and that fell to five hours and 13 minutes with each reside. 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 bundle weighs 3.5 kilos, or 2.8 kilos with out the keyboard. That’s a bit on the heavy aspect, which is to be anticipated, however lower than some conventional 14-inch laptops I’ve examined prior to now 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 routinely. 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, virtually randomly.
{Photograph}: Asus
My greatest grievance nonetheless is design-related. In contrast to 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 aspect of my mind, which insists that side-by-side screens be aligned on the identical airplane.
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 should shift to working straight off a single laptop computer show, my productiveness vanishes.
The Duo has a price ticket of $1,700—and that’s for the absolutely loaded configuration. That’s not precisely low-cost, but it surely’s far cheaper 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 machine in the event you’re in any respect like me, discovering {that a} single, small display screen fences you in and slows you down.
