people are always trying to change the laptop for some reason razer went and
put a touchscreen under their touchpad like six years ago moved it off to the
right apple took away the function keys on their professional notebooks and
replaced them with the much maligned touch bar like here's the thing guys if it ain't
broke don't freaking fix it
is what i would have said before today
right here in front of me is the ASUS zenbook duo and zenbook pro duo
and i think these might make me eat my words because this appears
to be far more than just another stupid
gimmick
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so let's jump right into it with the zenbook pro duo it comes with this wrist
rest it's got kind of a little magnetic thing that's going to help
align it but there's there's no actual functionality here other than improving
the ergonomics because ASUS knows from their experience with their gaming
lineup that moving the keyboard down does tend to have a bit of a detrimental
impact on ergonomics now what they also
learned from their zephyrus lineup of gaming laptops is that a surefire way to
pack more performance into a notebook is to lift it up off the table a little bit
so that gives us a slight angle here in terms of our ergonomics and also more
room for the laptop to breathe so they're calling this their ergo lift
hinge or something like that and essentially what it does is it
allows them to pack an eight core hk
series processor and an rtx 2060 into a
shockingly compact little device here in terms of i o we've got Thunderbolt 3
microphone headphone full-sized usb-a
then we've got HDMI another usb-a and more ventilation as well as a power in
over here that is a freaking lot of performance and they say that unlike the
original zenbook pro they are not going to be experiencing any thermal slowdown
so i'm going to hold them to that now let's go ahead and talk about the star
of the show here which is the secondary
4k but to be clear not ultra hd because
it's actually 3840 by 1100 pixels
secondary display so the way that it works unlike previous
implementations where we've relied on kind of janky
software is it's just another display in Windows that's right
below your main one so if you want to move a tab in between them all you do is
grab your touchpad and boom drag a
window it is actually that simple so the
multitasking potential for this is absolutely incredible and they have
actually built some software tools specifically for it that
honestly allowed to do some pretty cool stuff so over here on the left hand side
they've got a little thing that you can either touch with your finger or
activate with the mouse that allows you to set up a few of your presets so let's
say i wanted to book a trip for example
i could have my hotel website up on the top my calendar and a maps application
on the bottom and who knows i might want to throw a calculator down there to see
how much this whole thing's going to cost me or if i'm more of a creative
type i can fire up my creation software on my main screen browse for files on
the bottom left here and then control my music over on the right hand side and
managing Windows down here is actually surprisingly easy so you can either have
it be a full window down at the bottom
you can have two side by side and it works exactly the same way as your
traditional arrow snap so you just pull it over onto the side and bipoppy there
you go there's a different one over there or ASUS built a custom thing where
you can drag it up to a little bar on the top and you can have three things
down on the bottom if you decide okay you know what really i'd rather focus on
youtube right now all you do is hit this button right here and boom my youtube
and my music's up here and now i am browsing the web down here honestly as a
writer i could see myself using this all the freaking time because now i'm having
the typewriter experience down here i've got what i'm working on right below me
and then up here i can have whatever you know uh article or like a reviewer's
guide or whatever it is that i'm referencing because honestly i don't
need to see that much of a document that i'm working on now one thing i haven't
mentioned from a usability standpoint is oh yeah that right hand side touch pad
that i have not been a fan of in the past but honestly for the extra
productivity that i'm going to get out of this screen i could overlook that
with one small improvement i'd like to see a couple of the keys over here be
able to be rebound to left and right click so that i can operate it
two-handed then i just honestly don't see a reason why
this can't be my next notebook i certainly hope it could be
now one thing that's not finalized is the panel technology the one i'm looking
at right now is a 4k OLED up here and it's a glossy display and then it's that
3840 by 1100 lcd with a matte display
down here that's to give you a better feel on your stylus and prevent
reflections from the top display from interfering with the image but it could
be that depending on the region you're going to end up with an implementation
on the pro that's more like this zenbook duo sample so here we've had the display
downgraded to 1080p but something you might have noticed
especially if i were to open up here we go a web page that i can scroll through
here is that they match a lot better so
in this case not only are they both matte but they're both lcd so that a
you're gonna have a much cleaner experience as you scroll through a page
like this look at that isn't that freaking cool and b ASUS says that on
the pro model in some regions they're aiming for lcd because they can achieve
better delta ease for content creators and they really want people to be able
to get real work done on these things as opposed to just
watch youtube videos and browse the news so this one is a smaller screen it's a
lower end processor up to core i7 what was it u series so that's up to a quad
core it's got a little bit less i o but it does get significantly better
portability and it still has dedicated graphics with a GeForce mx250 in it so i
want to hear from you guys because last year at computex we showed their dual
screen notebook concept and my big thing was like guys you're never getting rid
of the keyboard but this
this i could get behind
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