With this year’s CES on full display this week, companies are showing off new advances in their new hardware products slated to come out this year.
One of those products is coming from ASUS’s 2021 Zenbook lineup, the ASUS Zenbook Pro Duo 14 and ASUS Zenbook Pro Duo 15 OLED. One of the most interesting features of the ASUS laptop that continues to catch my attention – from the previous models – is the dual monitor feature.
The extended display, the ScreenPad Plus, is featured below where the keyboard would usually be located on an everyday laptop. To get around that, Asus has smartly compacted the keyboard and trackpad into the lower part of the ‘lap’ section of the computer.
The lack of palm rest is a design flaw, which they fix with the palm rest accessory.
The ScreenPad Plus display itself isn’t more than just another screen, it has a touch control mode that programs can utilize. Currently only four Adobe suite programs – Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects and Lightroom Classic – utilize the touchpad mode
Asus is hoping more developers get on board to make their programs compatible with the open-source model, which Asus says developers can reach them at this email address.
While most laptops have the same form factor, the design of ASUS’ 2021 Zenbook Pro Duo feels more like a sneak peek or more so an evolution of that laptop form factor. One screen never feels like enough so the extra screen room – which you can adjust the angle 0f the ScreenPad Plus display – will definitely help multitaskers.
Getting into the hardware itself, let’s start with the Asus Zenbook Pro Duo 14. The device is marketed as ‘the most portable 14-inch laptop with a secondary display’ and ‘ultra computing for productivity’.
It features a 12.6-inch ScreenPad Plus display, 11th generation Intel i7 processor, thunderbolt 4 USB-C support, HDMI 1.4 and an Nvidia Geoforce MX450 Intel Iris Xe GPU. The lower tier model also features a 1080p display on both displays.
Unlike this model, the ASUS Zenbook Pro Duo 15 OLED – which is being marketed to creators –has a much better display with a fantastic 4K OLED HDR touchscreen display.
The only con of the 15-inch laptop is that its 14.4-inch ScreenPad Plus is not an OLED screen. Other than that it’s a really powerful piece of hardware, which features an Intel i9 processor, an Nvidia GeForce next-gen laptop GPU with ray-tracing graphics, 32 GB of DDR4 ram and 1 TB of storage.
The ASUS Zenbook Pro Duo 14 and ASUS Zenbook Pro Duo 15 OLED is releasing this spring. No pricing was mentioned during our preview.
ASUS ZenBook Duo 14 (UX482) will be available for pre-order starting on January 14, 2021, in North America at the following retailers: Amazon and ASUS US Store (UX482EA-DS71T), ASUS US Store (UX482EG-XS74T), ASUS US Store (UX482EG-XS77T), ASUS US Store (UX482EA-ES51T).
ASUS ZenBook 13 OLED (UM325) will be available starting from February 2021 in North America.
