Asus ZenBook Pro Duo: Notebook with double 4K touch display
[11:34 Tue,28.May 2019 by Thomas Richter]
Asus continues to develop the idea of a secondary display in its notebooks - if this was still a 5.5 inch touch display at ZenBook Pro 15 last year, Asus will give its ZenBook Pro Duo laptop, which was just presented at the computer trade fair Computex, a real second screen in addition to the 15.6" OLED main display, the so-called ScreenPad Plus.
Asus is now placing the ScreenPad Plus above the keyboard as an extension of the actual screen - a maximum version of Apple's narrow Touch Bar. Asus is also targeting creative applications that can make good use of additional valuable screen space - e.g. by displaying windows or tool palettes of the program running on the main screen. In a demo video, Asus shows the navigation in the timeline of Corel VideoStudio Pro displayed in ScreenPad Plus via touch operation.
Asus ZenBook Pro Duo in use with Corel VideoStudio Pro
To make room for this, Asus has now placed the traditional touchpad below the keyboard to the right of it - this is now also a touch display and can therefore also be used as a number pad, e.g. by fading in virtual number keys. The price for the room-filling second screen: the keys of the keyboard are set narrower than normal and therefore need getting used to when typing, as well as the user has to get used to the new, lateral positioning of the trackpad and when typing, if necessary, use the attachable included hand rest.
The OLED main monitor - also with touch capability - has a resolution of UltraHD 4K (3,840 x 2,160) and 100% covers the professional DCI-P3 color space, the secondary 14" IPS touch display in 32:9 format has about half of the vertical pixels (3,840 x 1,100). The second display can simply be used as an extension of the main screen, merging the two into a single screen with a resolution of 3,840 x 3,260 pixels, or - like Apple's Touch Bar - as a dedicated App Launcher, App Display, multitasking or stylus input.
Asus ZenBook Pro Duo
Asus also offers a smaller version with a 14" main display and a 12.6" secondary display, the ZenBook Duo. Both displays have FullHD resolution. The ZenBook Pro Duo, which weighs about 2.5kg, can be configured with an Intel i9 CPU with 8 cores and a Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU, the smaller version with only one i5 processor and a GeForce MX250 GPU.
Both models offer Thunderbolt 3 USB-C, two USB-A and one HDMI port. The Zenbook Pro Duo is expected to be available from the third quarter of 2019 - Asus has not yet expressed an opinion on the prices.
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