Asus ZenBook Pro Duo Preview – Half 4k panel as a second screen
Creatives and avid PC users often work with more than one monitor. If you’re working on a desktop, it’s a matter of connecting an extra screen, but if you’re on the road with a laptop, it’s less obvious. Manufacturers have been looking for solutions for some time. For example, Razer showed a prototype of a laptop with three screens a few years ago and Asus introduced its first laptops with ScreenPad at Computex last year .
Those first ScreenPad laptops had a 5.5″ LCD in place of the touchpad, and with that limited size, that LCD was nowhere near a second monitor in terms of functionality. That’s different with the new ZenBook Pro Duo, which Asus took to this year’s Computex trade show in Taiwan, replacing the tiny screen with a much larger one that sits above the keyboard and takes up half the body, effectively half a monitor at and Asus calls it ScreenPad Plus.
OLED and LCD
The primary screen of the ZenBook Pro Duo is a 15.6″ OLED panel with a 4k resolution. It is probably the OLED panel from Samsung that we first encountered in various laptops at the CES fair. Various manufacturers bring around this time laptops with the OLED screen off. The screen above the keyboard is an IPS LCD with a resolution of 3840×1100 pixels. The width of the screen is equal to that of the primary screen and the number of pixels is also the same in width , so that the screens connect well to each other. Both screens are touchscreens.
In terms of dimensions and resolution, the screens therefore fit well together, but when it comes to color reproduction and contrast, this is not the case. The primary OLED screen has a much higher contrast and can display more colors than the IPS LCD, which you can clearly see if you show an image on both screens, for example. In practice, this does not have to be disturbing, because there are many situations in which you display the most important image on the primary screen and place controls or secondary programs on the second screen.
Asus has provided the IPS panel on the housing with an anti-reflective coating. That’s handy, because light sources are often above you and will therefore shine directly on the panel. The coating does its job well, because the screen remains legible in conditions with difficult light. The primary OLED panel is glossy and therefore reflects a lot more.
Screen Pad Plus
Although Asus has significantly modified last year’s ScreenPad concept with the ZenBook Pro Duo, the name remains the same. Asus adds Plus to make it clear that this is a larger version. Also this time, Asus has made its own software to ensure that the screen is convenient to use. On the left side of the screen is an icon that is always on screen and with which you call up a quick menu. In that menu are all kinds of shortcuts and functions of the screen.
You can place shortcuts to apps here yourself and if you then press them, they will be opened on the second screen. There is also a function to save workspaces . For example, if you start Photoshop on the primary screen and open certain folders or other apps on the second screen, you can save that layout as a preset. This way you don’t have to drag all apps to the desired place every time.
Because the second screen is large in size this time, you can easily use it as a regular second screen, even without special software. Editing video, photos or audio with the result on the primary screen and tools on the second screen, such as a timeline or layers, are scenarios where the design of the ZenBook Pro Duo seems very useful to us. You are dependent on the software, for example, which must support displaying the timeline in a separate window, so that you can properly pin it to the second screen.
Enclosure and hardware
Due to the placement of the second screen, the keyboard has been moved to the bottom and to the right of that is the touchpad. There is therefore no place to rest your wrists, although Asus does release an accessory that you can put down to get some support. This is useful if you work at a desk, but on location or on a train or plane, for example, you probably won’t have room for it. In addition, the placement of the touchpad to the right of the keyboard is inconvenient for left-handers.
What is also immediately noticeable is that the ZenBook Pro Duo is a thick and heavy laptop. It weighs about 2.5 kilograms. It is therefore equipped with fast hardware; it takes a maximum of a Core i9-9980HK, a 45W processor with eight cores. The video card is a GeForce RTX 2060 and up to 32GB of RAM and storage is available in the form of an NVMe SSD of up to 1TB. The housing itself is made of CNC machined aluminum and feels solid.
Smaller model
So the ZenBook Pro Duo is quite a large and heavy device. Asus realizes that not everyone likes that and also comes with a smaller and lighter 14″ alternative. The manufacturer drops the Pro designation for that model, the laptop is simply called ZenBook Duo. The weight is about 1.5 kg and this makes it a lot more manageable than the Pro model.
The ZenBook Duo’s design is similar to its bigger brother, but with a smaller screen. In addition, the 14″ panel is an IPS LCD and not an OLED screen. The resolution of 1920×1080 pixels is also a lot lower and the primary screen is not a touchscreen. The second screen is also an IPS LCD and that panel is also 1920 pixels wide. What is striking is that the ZenBook Duo has a different coating on the second screen, which reflects a bit more.
The ZenBook Duo is therefore a lot lighter, but also has less powerful hardware than the Pro model. It has a 15W processor inside; the model we saw was equipped with the Core i7-8565U quad core. The video card is a GeForce MX250.
Screen Pad 2.0
With the introduction of the ScreenPad Plus design, last year’s solution seems to have died a quick death, but that’s not true. Asus continues to make ScreenPad laptops with an LCD instead of a touchpad. However, those screens are no longer in new ZenBook Pro models, but in the line-up below. There will be variants of the ZenBook 13, 14 and 15 with ScreenPad and Asus also provides models in the cheaper VivoBook series with the screen.
The reason that the ScreenPad is now in those thinner laptops is that the screen can be controlled by the integrated graphics card of the Intel processors. With last year’s ZenBook Pro, the Nvidia GPU was used to control the ScreenPad. The disadvantage of this was that the GPU is always on when using the ScreenPad, which shortens the battery life. ScreenPad 2.0 solves that problem. Also with the ZenBook Duo models, the Nvidia GPU does not have to be activated to use the extra screen.
In addition, Asus uses wider screens for the second generation of its ScreenPad, with a 21:9 ratio and a resolution of 2160×1080 pixels. The first ScreenPad laptops were 16:9 screens with a full HD resolution.
We wrote about the operation of the ScreenPad earlier in our review of the ZenBook Pro UX580 . Then we called the screen a nice gimmick, but we also noted that we have to wait for developers to do something with it. We are now almost a year later and there is still little software that is optimized for the second screen in Asus laptops. It is hoped that this will improve as Asus brings the functionality to more of its laptops.
Conclusion
Asus puts a lot of effort into its ScreenPad functionality. The Plus variant in the ZenBook Duo models is a big step up from last year’s implementation. And we mean literally big; you get half a screen with it. The second screen would come into its own with tuned software and it is to be hoped that it will come. A year after the introduction of the first ScreenPad laptops, manufacturers have not yet responded eagerly, so that is not a certainty.
The advantage of the large second screen is that you are much less dependent on special software. Thanks to the size, you can use the Duo screen much better as a regular second monitor and we see something in that. What Asus’ laptop with double screen will cost remains to be seen. We heard an amount between 2500 and 3000 British pounds, converted about 2850 to 3450 euros, for the ZenBook Pro Duo. It is not yet known which configuration this concerns. The laptop should be on sale in July, but it is unclear whether it will be released immediately in the Benelux.