ASUS says incredible comes from within and do you know what's within you? A
laptop with two screens. That's right. Today we are talking about the ASUS
ZenBook Duo, the newest redesigned 2026
Edition. And I know that this is an unboxing channel, but I have actually been using
this for like 2 weeks and spoiler alert, I love it. It's not without its quirks
and problems, but I'll tell you all about that later after we get through
the unboxing portion. In the box you get the laptop in a nice classy new I don't
know kind of the minimal ASUS ZenBook
redesign which is very pedestrian and bland. It is about 5 years too late to
the sans serif font trend and I hope that they maybe make something more
flashy in the future, which is crazy cuz I feel like I've been telling ASUS to
make their stuff less flashy for so long, but that's more on the gaming
side. In here we have our charger. It is a 100 watt charger that charges via
USB-C. Love to see it. No proprietary BS
here and in here we can see oh, cer鋁num.
How many cer aluminum? They call out their new cer鋁num material
which you can see on the top of here is a nice little finish. But what is
cer鋁num? Basically, the aluminum body of the laptop has been impregnated with
ceramic that allows it to have a very high hardness making it very scratch
resistant and honestly
feels really, really good. They used basically the same thing on the OnePlus
15 which I adored the hand feel of and you know after a little bit of use it is
holding up. It also does a decent job of keeping a nice like not totally matte
finish, but also blocking out fingerprints. You can see some
fingerprints from my greasy grabbers because I've been using a little bit lately, but on the whole it looks really
good. Wow. First thing you'll probably notice when you pull this out is that it
is pretty thick for a modern laptop.
Let's take my Surface Book out to compare. But despite the thickness, this
thing's actually like a pretty similar weight to my Surface Book, which is kind
of crazy to me. And while it is large, it's very very sturdy. Like this thing
is jam-packed. There's not a part of here that is creaking or bending unless
you're really trying to make it do that. And that includes the kickstand on the
back, which has some more information as well as quick access to your M.2 slot if
you want to add additional storage. Pretty cool. What might not be so cool
is the processor itself. Right now, this looks like it is the intake and on the
sides here we have our exhausts. And
this is a pretty powerful laptop that we have here. It sports a Intel Core Ultra
9 388H, which is their Oh, it's X9.
It's And this thing is a And this thing sports a pretty powerful
CPU. An Intel Core Ultra X9
388H. Wow. That's basically the top-of-the-line Panther Lake chip, which
also means that this thing's going to have pretty good graphics performance,
pretty good battery life. I am really really excited to talk more about it,
but let's talk about the ports. On this side we have an HDMI 2.1 port, a
Thunderbolt 4, which can do USB-C, can do power delivery, can do DisplayPort
Alt Mode, basically everything you need. And on the other side, I almost missed
this, the combination headphone microphone jack. And on the other side,
another Thunderbolt 4 port fully featured and a single USB-A port and a
power button. Now, if you got laser eyes, you might notice that there is another USB-C port here. That is for the
detachable keyboard, but it doesn't allow you to connect to the computer.
However, you can use the keyboard via the USB-C key to connect to other
systems, which is pretty cool. Shall we open her up?
Obviously, it's got that premium hinge, so you only need one hand to open it up without it tipping. Though, I did notice
there there's quite a lot of play when
you try and set the position. Like it
I want it here and it goes back quite a bit. It's not a big criticism, but it's
also like not perfect. Another interesting thing about the hinge is that it reminds me very much of like the
Galaxy Fold phones where you have this kind of solid piece down the middle and
then these outer edges slide over the spine in a way that allows you to have
basically zero gap between the two displays. And as I did
that, the keyboard actually just came right off. So, let's talk about that. On
the blanket that it gives, it says you can charge it. You can charge it or you
can Bluetooth it. And they have the smart zone so you can do brightness in
the one side. You can do scrubbing with the top of it or change your volume. And
if you use the top right corner, you can open a settings menu very quick. And look at that. I love that that we
have a nice big trackpad here and it the keyboard itself has a great finish to
it. The trackpad has a different more glass kind of feeling compared to the
seralumen of the rest. And the other side has this kind of really soft touch
kind of plastic that is quite enjoyable that I think is there to help prevent
getting too many scratches on the bottom screen.
I do wish that we got full-sized arrow keys. I think it's very strange that
every laptop is afraid of just making the arrow keys full-size and having them
jut out a little bit. They don't have to be in line. It might look a little janky, but I think it would be pretty
nice.
The typing experience on this pretty standard. It's very quiet.
But the space between the keys I find makes it really easy to type on. You do
have the Copilot button because this is a Copilot Plus PC cuz it's just chalk
full of all that AI stuff that you love. You have your function row, but on top
of your Fs1 through 12, you get a couple of bonus buttons. One of them allows you
to swap the displays quickly and one of them allows you to turn off one of the displays when you are using this in the
Bluetooth mode. On the side of the keyboard, you have your USB-C port and a
switch that allows you to turn it off if you're using it in the wireless mode
either with the laptop or with another device because this just connects via
Bluetooth. Gosh, ew. What the hell is this? What the Why would they put that
there? It literally extends over the bezel. That's hideous. Just put it on
the bottom with the rest of the stupid stickers.
On regular laptops, is there an HDMI sticker attached to the screen like
>> I I don't think I've ever seen an HDMI sticker on a laptop. Like who cares?
You're HDMI, dude. You're a port. Shut up. A bit of extra clarification about
this USB-C port. It can send keyboard inputs, but it does not send like data
via USB. It's mainly just for charging or if you wanted to connect via a wire
to either your laptop or another system. But I think it's kind of cool that you
can just use this with literally anything else. They could have made it proprietary and they didn't. However, I
have a couple of issues with the trackpad. The main thing being you can
click through the bottom of this thing so easily. And it's such a shame because
one of the coolest things about this is that I could be kicking it back at my
desk typing like this. But then like even the slightest bit of weight, if I'm
not very careful about the positioning, I get misclicks cuz it's physically
clicking the button. And there's no way to turn off like a physical click on the
button. I would love to see if that was possible so I could just use capacitive
touch inputs cuz this is both physical and capacitive touch. I just don't know
if ASUS would implement that. But please. I please Please do it, ASUS.
That would make this so good. Now to be fair to ASUS, this is an issue on a lot
of laptops, but it's even an issue when I'm holding it against the glass, right?
Like if I'm doing this, I can still get clicks and inputs that I don't want.
It's just It's just like such a little blemish on what is overall a really good
user experience. I'm hovering over this like watch together button. Watch.
I I clicked it. Like it's really, really easy to do. Another kind of issue I have
with the keyboard is that it's a little difficult to get on and off of the
laptop, especially compared to prior years' models. Using magnets placed
around the edge of the display and on the edge of the keyboard, it fastens
pretty nicely. Like, you're not going to accidentally like shake it off or anything. And it doesn't have too much
play when it's on the device itself. It's just that like there's nowhere to
There's nowhere to grab it. So, I found that the easiest way to get it is to
like kind of go into the corners and use both hands to kind of like
But, I really wish the keyboard had some spot on it that extended at least beyond
this thin part of the bezel so that I could easily grab it without kind of
like which is like Now, I've just like rubbed it across the screen and you can see
there's smuts all over it. Like, there's it's it's scary, you know? I don't want
to scratch the screen, though I probably already have. But, what's really cool
about how it does connect is look at At the bottom of the screen, there's these
little pogo pins. But, here's the cool thing. They're completely recessed if
you do close the laptop like this without the keyboard, you don't have to
worry about those metal pins scratching the display because they recess with
magnets. So, they connect right here on the keyboard. As I get close to the
pins, they pop out. Isn't that neat?
I think it's pretty neat. But, I've said a lot about just the
keyboard and some of the coolest parts of this laptop are found with the
display and the PC itself. And we'll talk about all of that after this
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today with Akiflow. Use our link in the video description. Man, it just kind of
like any thing that's like stuck to the
bottom of this just immediately appears on your screen. It's It's kind of
annoying. You have to like be careful to be like, "Okay, I'm going to take this off and then wipe my screen and then put
it on." Especially if you're concerned about longevity. And you're going to want to take care of these displays
because these are two really nice
displays. The ZenBook Duo comes with two 14-in displays that have variable
refresh rate up to 144 Hz. They're 3K
displays and they can get up to 1,000 nits peak brightness in HDR and are
rated for 500 nits in SDR. The fact that they're OLED means that you have really
great viewing angles, which is awesome because you have, you know, a lot of
angles that you're going to be looking at this at, especially because they advertise that this is an angle. This is
a way to do it. This is a way to do it. This is a way to do it.
And this is a way a way to do it. I find that that this is not a very effective
way of using them and the stand feels really flimsy in this way. You basically
have to have it flat open, but honestly, it is really nice to be able to say like
have like maybe a full page script as well as some apps on the side. I,
however, think that this is honestly more ergonomic for me because I really
like that how it brings up the top display so you're not kind of doing the like laptop hunch all the time. And the
fact that they're pretty bright displays means that any sort of overhead lighting is going to be easier to overcome on the
bottom display. In my usage, I found them to be very good-looking displays. I
think they look great with all types of content, but let's get some specific
information from Labs. On the whole in SDR, the display is decently color
accurate, but has some problems specifically with gamma tracking.
Sometimes things can be brighter than they should be or darker than they
should be. However, when you switch to HDR, on the whole the display performs
really really well and it's very You're going to What you're seeing is going to be very close to the artist's intent and
you wouldn't have to be too worried if you had were doing some mildly color sensitive work. And those results hold
true over both of the displays. So, not only are these displays like good
displays, but they have to be like relatively similar and relatively matched so that when you show your
content on either display, it's still going to look correct. And they did a
pretty dang good job. I can't articulate
how much I love this. Like this whole thing of having the
keyboard out here, having the extra headroom, this way being able to play a
game, and then having like my chats on the bottom, any sort of other like maybe
a guide up because I'm a little pleb and I'm too stupid to figure out how to
solve a puzzle. This is such a good experience. One thing though is that
having so much space dedicated to screens means I had to make some
trade-offs and one of those trade-offs is the speakers. The speakers are
contained in the tiny little gap between the screen. Unlike a typical laptop
where you can do some sort of emanation of sound through the keyboard, um you
got a big old screen in the way. And there's no obvious porting in the back.
Maybe they fire a little bit out here, but uh you know, let's take a quick
little test and see how they sound. I am not helpful.
Yeah, this is like not a whole lot there for bass.
They also don't They don't get that loud.
For a laptop of its size and price point, they're not very good speakers.
But most laptops at this size and price point don't have a whole extra screen.
To me, it's decent and totally serviceable, but it's not going to be like a MacBook Pro where you can use it
in lieu of a Bluetooth speaker. That's just the compromise you have to make.
Continuing on stuff that is still on the external part of the display, let's talk about the webcam. Honestly, the webcam,
it's nothing to write home about. The specs are decent, but maybe a little low
for a something of in this price range.
But it's completely serviceable. I think the image quality is decent.
And the real benefit is like the ergonomic benefit of being able to have
a camera at face height. So, it's not like looking up at your nose like so
many awful webcam Like so many awful laptop webcams do
where you're just like
You know? And I think that kind of concludes the tour of the outside of the laptop. Let's
talk about what's inside of it. And inside of it, it's pretty kitted out.
Obviously we have a top end Intel processor. We get 32 GB of LPDDR5X
memory running at 9600 MT/s because it is soldered. We also
have a included Samsung 1 TB NVMe with
the ability to expand that NVMe storage through the bottom. And it has a 99 W
hour battery, which is really, really
big. And something that Intel's been I think really pushing for with these Panther Lake releases, which is great
because that means that this thing got like 15 hours of battery life in our
video playback test. And anecdotally, I never found it to be unacceptable. Even
when I was using both screens the whole time. It seems like using both displays,
even at high brightness, is only going to cut down your battery life by like 20
to 30%, which is pretty good. And if you
are worried, you can obviously use various dimming features to dim one of
the displays or turn one of the displays fully off when it's not active. It's a
pretty nice. And I guess this is as good of a time to talk about the included software as any. Um ASUS loves including
a lot of extra stuff you don't need. Uh I don't know what Story Cube is and I
don't care to find out. All I know is it's not related to the function of this
laptop. What is though is their ScreenXpert utility, which I think is
pretty nice. It's a little quick setting menu that helps you control each display.
You can do stuff like virtual input, sharing mode, second screen, stuff like
that. And then the MyASUS app contains a lot of your other settings like
hibernate helper or you can even change your memory allocation for your iGPU. So
you can actually give even more memory to your GPU if you want or if you need
more for your CPU multitasking stuff, you can do that, too. I do wish that
they gave us access to fan speeds. They give you different fan profiles, but you
can't actually design your own fan curve. There we go.
And that was weird. It glitched out. Like at 100% the fan
profile was not applying properly cuz the CPU was in the middle of doing Dead
Space. And I'm going to tell you this much, this thing doesn't cool perfectly.
It the CPU will overheat. I never found it to be like catastrophic overheating,
but it is something to note that even in this with the highest fan profile
available, you can see some overheating, especially in gaming. Yeah, like okay,
here the like so I installed stuff cuz I was I was using it, but like by default
here's some of the default software you get pinned in Windows. So, you get the
entire Office Suite that you're not allowed to use until you sign up and pay
for it. You get Dropbox, ASUS GlideX,
which is their like utility that lets you like use your phone, easily share
files between your phone and your laptop, as well as Dolby settings, Story
Cube, Virtual Assistant. Like what is Virtual Assistant? What could it
possibly be? It's an intelligent system that I will soon find indispensable to
my life. Oh my god, it's a Clippy. They made a Clippy. So, yeah, I was
gaming on this a decent amount. I played a lot of Deadlock, and it does a fine
job. Look, you see there's some chugging right there. We're also screen recording,
and I don't have it at the highest settings, but like we're getting like 90
to 100 FPS on power. You won't get the same performance on battery. You have to
be plugged in to get the maximum amount of performance, but this thing can kind
of handle anything you can throw at it. So, we're going to get into like an
actual fight. We're going to see some particle effects, some stuff actually happening right here. We're kind of
locked like 109 FPS, which is really great. I brought this to the Wayland and
played quite a few games on it, and really didn't encounter any major
problems once I lowered the resolution and, you know, tweaked the settings a little bit. The Intel Arc B390 found in
these new Panther Lake CPUs, it's so
good. It's amazing what Intel has done in their graphics department and I'm
really excited to see if they bring that these improvements to the desktop. But,
this is all anecdotal stuff and we need to get some freaking facts. So, let's
see what the Labs has to say. For comparison, Labs brought in a Lenovo
laptop with the same chipset as this one, as well as an Asus ZenBook with
AMD's currently available flagship mobile CPU, the HX370,
to see how they hold up. And in Rocket League, well, things look great for
Intel and also great for this laptop where we see barely any difference in
performance between the Lenovo and the ZenBook Duo. However, when you look at
AMD's, uh it's uh not so good. Like, basically
like half the performance of the Intel. And
that's also true in uh Dota 2. And in
Cyberpunk, where AMD's is kind of getting whooped by Intel's iGPUs.
Really, AMD makes great CPUs, but their GPUs are struggling, especially compared
to Intel. Like, in Cyberpunk, you're getting 62 FPS on average here and 53 in
the lows. That's a super great gaming experience and that's at medium settings
at 1,200 p. Like, that's awesome. And if you want to crank the resolution a
little bit higher, you do lose a lot of frames, but you're still going at 39 FPS
average. And this thing really isn't struggling compared to the Lenovo. Now,
Labs never saw this thing thermally throttling in their testing. However, in
my usage, I did actually see it throttle a couple of times, but it was never to
the point that my performance took a massive nose dive. So, honestly, for
thermals, when you have a whole extra display in the bottom, like, everything
is here, it does a pretty damn good job. Now, all of this is super mega very
cool, but how much are you paying to get something this exotic? Well, less than
you'd think. This is just $2,700.
Okay, maybe it's not just $2,700. That is a pretty penny. That is not a cheap
laptop. But, you're getting two high-end
displays, a top-of-the-line chipset, and
decent levels of storage. It I'm honestly I would have expected this
thing to be like four to five hundred dollars more expensive than what it is.
Yes, you can find similarly spec'd machines in a more typical form factor
for cheaper. Yes, you can find better battery life elsewhere. But when you
consider that compared to other exotic display laptops like the Lenovo
rollable, which is like $3,300,
this thing's pretty good. And if gaming's not really your thing, you can save a little bit more money by going
with the $2,500 version of this with the Ultra 9 386H
that foregoes having the GPU, but still gives you
basically all of the great processing power that you can find on Panther Lake.
I love this thing, and I am going to do
my best to steal it from the office and use it for as long as I can. You will
take this laptop from my cold, dead hands, okay? Thank you for watching
ShortCircuit. If you enjoyed this video, why don't you get subscribed and keep your eyes peeled for the Lenovo rollable
display laptop. It's pretty crazy. And
it also it might already be out. So if it's out, we're going to put it here.
Or here. It's going to be on screen.