it looks perfectly normal but watch this there's a little kickstand under here
then okay I can take the keyboard off and boom second display that's right
guys ASUS sponsored this video and brought CES 20124 here to our studio to
show off the brand new Zenbook Duo that
considering the dual screen laptops we've seen in the past has had a
shocking amount of thought put into it I guess it kind of makes sense though this
is far from ASUS's first run at this concept first they put a screen in a
trackpad which was of questionable utility then they moved the keyboard
down and put a screen above it which was pretty sweet for video editors and only
video editors then last year they released the Zenbook 17 fold which was
pretty cool but had an eyew watering
$3500 reserved purely for those with more money than brains well that's where
the new Zenbook Duo comes in by issuing
sci-fi screen technology and instead going for a simple hinge ASUS was able
to fold the starting price in half
putting this thing in reach of middle managers rather than just those in the
sea suite and ASUS actually identified this need when their own marketing
department asked for it this is what I'm talking about laptops have gotten so
powerful that many companies just don't bother issuing desktops anymore and this
is the weapon of choice for many staffers at isus and actually here for
that matter it's pretty solid you drag your reference materials up here work on
your presentation down here but then shoot it's time to run to a meeting and
well I hope you didn't need your second screen meanwhile with the duo you can
pack the whole thing up and take it with you in exactly that amount of time
arrive at the meeting set up your battle station and uh God willing get some
actual work done while other people talk about stuff that has nothing to do with
your kpis for the panels on these machines you get either dual full HD
oleds on the base model or on the premium ones you can get dual 3K oleds
running at 120 HZ and isus advertises
four different operating modes for the machine laptop mode desktop mode sharing
mode or dual screen mode though I suspect most people are primarily going
to be switching between laptop and dual screen modes which worked surprisingly
well especially given that this is pre-production hardware like just look
at this boom laptop mode Let's
go like that that's pretty darn seamless
one mode I was hoping for that we didn't get is Battleship mode which I guess
you'd normally call tent mode on a flip laptop uh yeah that's as far as it goes
as Su said that they decided against it because a hinge that goes more than 180°
that also is large enough to accommodate the keyboard in the middle would have
been expensive and very heavy as it is
without the keyboard the Zenbook Duo comes in at just 1.35 kilos and with the
keyboard 1.65 k kilos with most of that weight being the displays themselves
which doesn't really surprise me like this thing feels flipping dense to help
counteract some of that the entire chassis is made out of magnesium alloy
uh side note by the way if you're wondering about the durability of the hinge ASUS says that with the keyboard
removed you can put up to 25 kg on top
of a closed shell before things start to go bad oh yeah that's ooh that would be
really important to know should I be doing this on the pre-production one
yeah you can sit on it on that note another advantage of the approach ASUS
took with this device is durability foldables super cool and I'm on the
record kind of loving them but they can't use Gorilla Glass and in a device
that's going to have stuff on top of the screen all the time by Design there's a
lot to be said for using a scratch resistant glass but the real Special
Sauce here isn't the displays it's actually the keyboard isus told us that
it was incredibly difficult to develop a keyboard controller that's able to
seamlessly handle going between a wired connection through these Pogo pins down
here and a Bluetooth one and then when you attach the keyboard it uses 14
magnets that ensure proper alignment with the Pogo pins and boom now it's
using a wired connection the other Big Challenge was building something this
thin that still manages to feel pretty
decent that's 14 magnets for you it
really does feel pretty decent doesn't it it's kind of like if you didn't have
a keyboard at all and there was just a keyboard embedded in the surface of the
table in front of you it's uh pretty cool 1.4 mm of travel
which how much of the entire thickness of this thing is that we can check yeah
we should check I love that Alex keeps a pair of calipers in his backpack 3 and
1/2 4 mm thick something like that so then that's about a third of it is key
travel wow and we haven't even talked about the possibility of still using a
third Monitor and then just moving this to wherever is most ergonomic for you
now you got three displays the overall concept of this machine is similar to a
folding one that I've been daily driving recently you know seamlessly switching
between I've just got to type a couple of emails mode and productivity monster
mode but something that I have sorely missed on my machine is decent IO and
this this is a big Improvement I've got a
usba a dual Thunderbolt ports HDMI and a
32 mm audio jack I mean it's not the same as a gaming PC but it is more than
enough for the typical Road Warrior these are Thunderbolt 4 too which I
guess makes sense this is running on the latest core Ultra 9 185h processor has
up to 32 gigs of lpddr 5x memory at a
wild 7467 megatrans per second this is
thanks to how close the RAM is to the CPU something ASUS worked on with Intel
last year it's got one SSD slot which
it's technically upgradeable but is underneath the main board so accessing
it won't be for the faint of heart only those in possession of the upcoming
Precision Screwdriver from LTT Store.com and it has a
75w battery that's a lot considering its
size and they're expecting it to be enough for 13 1/2 hours on one screen 10
hours on two screens though that isn't Final in designing the the cooling
solution ASUS said the difficult part wasn't keeping the processor cooled
they've done that hundreds of times at this point the hard part was keeping the
screen cool because OLED really doesn't
like high heat so they had to put a heat spreader behind the OLED panel maintain
a slim air gap between the CPU and the display and put a graphite sheet on the
bottom cover to ensure the display is always under 45° another way to manage
heat is running the displays dimmer and ASUS's solution to that is surprisingly
flexible screen expert allows you to not only adjust the displays but decouple
them if you've got a background noise when show running on one of them and you
want to save some battery on that screen but want to see what you're doing on the
other one you can share a flipped image between them you can lock in rotation
there's a bunch of other cool stuff in screen expert but my personal favorite
is the task groups task groups allow you
to position all of your applications exactly how you want across both
displays and then just click to open them all at once to the exact locations
you want I don't know about you guys but I hate arriving at work to find my
computer restarted overnight and all my Windows are messed up and I just have to
move them all around hey this is the solution I mean if you don't feel like
using power toys which is also a solution to that which brings us to the
end of the really cool stuff about this laptop and the beginning of the stuff
that I reluctantly talk about because ASUS really wants us too like the a
virtual
keyboard it's supposed to be six right six fingers
yeah nice oh did it nice it works really
well really good feature there it is everything else
about this machine is really cool and appears to solve real world problems
this is horrible but I mean I don't know
okay what if I forgot my keyboard and every other keyboard was consumed by the
great keyboard fire
yeah maybe pricing is expected to start
at around $1,500 and depending on your region it could come with a pen oh we
have those we have those we have them oh oh okay wow thanks
Alex pen wow carrying case wow backpack
neat and you might get them or you might
not if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out our other asuc CES coverage
where we looked at they updated gaming machines okay
they look pretty sick