ASUS has announced a new 15″ laptop with a hardware design that’s brand new (kind of). The ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo is designed for those of us who love to multi-task (usually with a couple of monitors on the desk) but also have the need to take that experience mobile.
Designed to give you the ultimate edge in workflow efficiency, the unique design features a full-width 4K ASUS ScreenPad Plus that works seamlessly with the main 4K UHD OLED display.
That screen in the body of the device looks like a massive expansion of the Macbook Pro’s touch bar. While Apple’s concept was to enable basic application controls to the top of your keyboard, ASUS went and turned that up to 11. The ScreenPad Plus is massive, stretching the entire width of the device and taking half over the available space on the base of the laptop.
The size of this display is both a blessing and a curse. It does force the laptop keyboard down to the bottom, meaning you don’t have a palm rest. If you can get your head around that, then the functionality actually does look impressive. You can be gaming on the main display, while having split screen of Twitch or YouTube chat, along with your return video feed, that’s neat and understands the modern multitasker.
The device has Pro in the name for a reason. The ZenBook Pro Duo also offers great functionality for those doing video editing who want to maximise the available space for content and assets, while moving effects pallets and toolbars to the supplementary screen. Because this second screen is so large, it opens the door to many varied and interesting possibilities.
Inevitably, there is always a tradeoff and that would be in the form of battery life, as running 2 screens won’t come cheap. While we don’t have firm numbers on that yet, you’re effectively adding another 50% of the display to the device which I’d expect to have a related impact on battery.
In terms of performance, the machine is packed with the 9th Generation Intel Core i9 8-core processor, the latest gaming-grade NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 graphics and blisteringly fast storage.
Still not convinced? Check out the promo video from ASUS.
