The FUTURE of CREATOR Laptop design?! Asus Zenbook Duo 2024 DUAL SCREEN Laptop Review

this unassuming little laptop hides a pretty big secret and it could well be the future of laptop designs this is the Asus Zenbook Duo 2024 and after using it for a few weeks it's quickly become my new favorite laptop so let's talk about it now first up Asus did send this to me for review however this is not a sponsored video all opinions are my own and Asus don't get to see it before you do so at first glance it looks and actually it functions exactly like a standard 14-in laptop albeit slightly thicker and slightly heavier on the outside it's a nice matte design with these funky geometric lines open it up and there's a tasty 14-in 3K OLED display under that there's a fully backlit keyboard which has a nice layout although it is missing the media controls across the top which is a bit of a shame keyboard is nice to use though and there's 1.4 mm of travel the trackpad is good too it's a decent size and it has all of the multi-touch goodness you would expect so just like any other 14-in laptop then pretty much there's actually very few compromises to using this just like a standard laptop but obviously that's not why we're here we want to talk dual screens simply pop the keyboard off to reveal the second 14-in OLED display they 3K resolution 16 by10 and they both look great in theory they they should be completely identical they're the same panel I found that one of mine is ever so slightly brighter than the other but it's not noticeable during Everyday Use they're also both 120 HZ although they will dynamically switch down to 60 HZ when on battery however you can disable this feature from within the included my Asus app there's 500 nits of brightness display HDR 500 true black certification and they hit 100% of the DCI P3 color Gam so they're fast accurate sharp and there's two of them they're both also touchcreen too which means they do function with the included Asus pen 2.0 flip it over and on the back you've got the wide metal and reassuringly solid kickstand which you can open up to about 90° from there you can stand it up in either landscape or portrait orientation and now you've got yourself a proper mobile go anywhere dual screens setup now landscape mode like this one on top of each other is where I'm most familiar and I love this setup this is the setup I use at home so being able to have a laptop to take anywhere to give me an atome kind of feeling desktop workstation thing is Mega so how does this all work well the keyboard is held on Via magnets and overall it's pretty secure there's a little bit of lateral movement if you give it a bit of a nudge but it won't actually slide off and that's not noticeable in in everyday usage so actually remove the keyboard you simply Pinch at the top lift and it comes straight off and the first thing you'll notice look how thin this is it's super thin and it's super light it's actually really impressive that they made a keyboard that's actually nice to type on so thin when it's actually on the laptop it connects via these Pogo pins so it is a physical connection which means there's no latency and no battery life to worry about it will also charge up when it is in place and you can check on the battery life and the charging status from the included screen expert app which again we'll talk about in a moment when it's actually off the laptop like this it will automatically switch over to a Bluetooth connection now the battery life of the keyboard is really good providing you remember to turn the back lighting off with the back Lighting on you'll be lucky to get an hour or two of usage which is not ideal and that has caught me out a few times remember to turn the back lighting off though and you'll easily get a full working day ideally I think they should patch that so that it turns the lighting off as soon as it's removed and then you can turn it back on if you want to fortunately there is a type- c port on the keyboard itself so if you do run out of juice you can give it a bit of a charge you can obviously still use it while it's charging too and it does charge pretty quick the only real difference is it is now completely flat there's no kind of fold out feet or anything you can prop it up with so it's not an angle it is sitting completely flush with the table the surface or whatever you're on that doesn't bother me too much but I know some people hate a flat keyboard the other downside due to that lack of feet once again is it's really slippery this will slide around on the table when you're using it I got around it by sort of wedging it up against the laptop but it is important to note because it can be a little bit annoying then when you're all done you can grab your keyboard sort of Chuck it back on and thanks to the magnets it should just align connect and do what it needs to do right let's just put that down for a second as since you remove the keyboard the second screen will automatically and pretty seamlessly come into life now generally it is seamless I have had a few occasions where there's some windows Jank and some of the T barss haven't changed as you'd expect them to but that was only on a handful of occasions in terms of angles obviously you've got the kickstand at the back and that opens up to a little bit past 90° while the actual main hinge can go just past 180° combined that gives you loads of flexibility to ensure the you can get it at just the right angle it's all really quite stable as well thanks to that big kickstand you're going to have to do something pretty dumb to knock it over however I must admit there is a fair bit of wobble in this top display boing now there is also a bit of a gap between these two displays but because they are identical they are the same size they sit pretty flush you don't really notice it it's not distracting or awkward to use in day-to-day life and actually this setup with this top screen here is at a really nice height you're looking straightforward at the display rather than looking down at a laptop display like you're used to that gives it a much more of a desktop style feel which I really like I actually found myself using this setup even if I didn't really plan on putting much on this bottom display there's actually a hotkey on the keyboard which if you hit it will disable this second screen so you can use it like this have it at a really nice height while also saving some battery life because you've only got one display running or alternatively you can just flip it straight over into your portrait mode or desktop mode as Asus call it I found myself going to this method when I was writing scripts I'd have word open on one with sort of a few tabs maybe PDFs open on another and it's a really really nice way to work if you've never worked with a portrait monitor you're missing out because it is really handy however it must be said it's not quite as refined in this layout if you want both screens to kind of be flat you have to open it all the way open and you don't get as much choice in terms of angles what I'd actually find myself doing was I'd put this display right in front of me nice and flat and then I'd just bend this one around to fit all my main stuff was on here and then the other bits were on this one it's all still quite stable though it's a bit wobbler in portrait mode but still you're not going to knock it off anytime soon oh and in this mode this portrait orientation you can't actually run the high performance mode in the my Asus app because this lower vent is now being blocked now if you forgot the keyboard or you just didn't want to use it for whatever reason you can use this with the inbuilt virtual keyboard all you need to do on the lower display six fingers give it a tap and it will bring up the virtual keyboard but it's exactly what you'd expect it to be it feels like you're typing on glass so there's no real feedback it's not the nicest thing to use it's handy in a pinch and it's good that it's there but it's not something that I found myself using all that often especially when you've got an actually really quite nice physical keyboard to hand now rather than using that virtual keyboard I actually found it made more sense to have it flat in this laptop mode and then just use the pen it's really handy for doing any sort of Doodles when this is lying flat on the desk I don't do that much doodling but every now and again I need to mark up a PDF or I need to sign anything so it is Handy to have it is also just generally quite nice to use it feels fast and responsive especially when the screen is set to 120 HZ the downside there's nowhere to store this and I am always losing things so it's not ideal you do need to make sure that you take care of your Asus pen and it is also just worth mentioning that you can close it up without the keyboard but you will end up with a bit of a gap so if you did want to take it anywhere without the keyboard you can but I would be a bit more careful with it because I'd imagine it's not quite as durable without the keyboard now last but not least there is what Asus call sharing mode but I like to call it battle ships mode you open this up all the way 180° and then you lay it flat now in this mode in theory you can have two people using the device at the same time you can either have this main display mirrored and then duplicated on the other one which would be handy if you're watching a movie with someone sat opposite you for example it's a shame the hinge doesn't go all the way round into like a tent mode cuz that probably would be better but this does kind of work lying flat alternatively you can have it so that the two screens are doing two independent things so you could have one person doodling away in paint while another browses Twitter for example if you happen to have two Asus pens like I do here you can have two people doodling away on either screen that could also work in an office or professional environment where you have two people in a meeting they could be reviewing two separate documents looking at spreadsheets or PowerPoints or whatever they need to do now I tested that with a handful of apps most of them seem to work but Edge for example doesn't it just gets really confused with the two different touch interfaces going on so I can't guarantee that that will work with every single app that you try as mentioned that is all handled by the screen expert app which we'll talk about very briefly it comes pre-installed and it's a little widget which exists on your desktop open it up and you can do things like set the brightness either synced or independently of the displays you can toggle on and off the virtual keyboard you can keep your eye on the keyboard battery life you can enable that sharing mode you can turn on or off this cool motion wallpaper which I really like as well as doing some other stuff like creating little task groups or setting custom layouts for the two displays now it's quite a neat feature but I find the window snapping to be perfectly usable so I kind of just stuck with that there's also an onscreen number pad handwriting detection and this handy little Touch hotkey app as well so that pretty much covers all of that what about actual performance well this is the top end model with the Intel Core Ultra 9 185h with integrated arc graphics it's 16 cores 22 threads it runs at 5.1 GHz Max and it has a TDP of 35 wat it will boost up to that 5.1 GHz but it will use a fair bit of power and create a fair bit of heat causing it to Thermal throttle however it will then settle and maintain that 35ish Watt that's all coupled with 32 GB of LP ddr5x Ram non upgradable by the way and a 2 tbte nvme SSD which is upgradeable I believe but you have to take the entire back off so it is a bit of a faf there's this little panel on the back which makes you think the SSD is hot swappable but it is not now there's no dedicated GPU in here and this is a relatively low powered device with that TDP of 35 W but the performance is pretty good running cinebench 2024 I recorded a single core score of 106 and a multi-core score of 731 that puts it just above the entry level Apple M3 in multicore but just behind it in single core still not too shabby the included SSD is pretty Pokey though here's some read and write speeds for those that are interested now from my point of view it all just feels really nippy and it zips along quite nicely especially doing that productivity admin kind of stuff then if you want to start to get some more creative work done to my surprise you actually can it's not too bad even when it comes to video editing indiv vent resolve cutting stuff up on the timeline running at 1080p is a dudle throw some 4K PR res on there and it's not quite as smooth you'll get the odd bit of delay here and there but generally it's pretty solid I tried some 6K anamorphic on a 4K scope timeline and that does start to stutter but once you knock the timeline proxy down to half you're good to go now things do slow down a bit when you start doing any of the GPU accelerated fancy stuff within resolve but it can still do it you can still run things like magic masks speed warps face refinement and all that fun stuff it's all here it's all working sometimes only a few frames per second but the fact that it can do it is a win in my book now I wouldn't necessarily recommend this as a video editing first device but it can do it and having this dual screen workstation combined with let's say a speed Editor to be able to chop some stuff together on the go is really really cool it's also great for photo editing as well Lightroom is great because that has a really nice dual screen layout and the performance in Lightroom once again is really quite good the same goes for Photoshop now I don't do tons in Photoshop but it's got enough power so that I can make all the thumb nails with my stupid face that I need to make and while it is obviously a little bit quicker when running on power because you can run it in high performance mode it's still pretty quick when running on battery you can still jump into Lightroom you can still mess around in Photoshop and you can still get some video editing work done and it's actually surprisingly efficient on the battery as well yo editor Alex here I actually cut the a roll for this video on the Zenbook Duo it was a 45 minute long 4K pror clip on performance mode while plugged in I created proxies which surprisingly were really quick they only took a few minutes then I unplugged it and set it to best efficiency and then cut away it took me 52 minutes exactly and within that time we used 26% battery so give or take 3 to 4 hours of editing on a single charge being on best efficiency it was silent throughout it did get a little bit stuttery at times but it was perfectly usable switched it over to to best performance rendered h.265 4K using the Intel quicksync which took only 8 minutes to render the entire 21 minute timeline leaving me on 66% overall that's thanks to the included 75w hour battery which is quoted at 8 hours of typical work or 13 plus hours of video playback when just using the one display for me in the real world when I was writing this review sat in a cafe had it in desktop mode I did about four or 5 hours of solid work I had word open a couple of tabs in Edge a PDF or two and I was listening to Spotify with some headphones in and over the course of that four or 5 hours I used a little over 60% battery which means of actual typical standard work with both displays you could quite comfortably manage about 6 hours which I think is pretty good knock one of the screens off and easily hit seven or eight hours you could easily do a full working day using it as a regular laptop when the battery does run out fortunately it does have quick charge so you can charge it up from 0% to 50% in just 30 minutes full charge takes about 2 hours it's also worth mentioning this this is the charger and it's dinky it's just a teeny tiny little 65 wat type c charger no big Power brakes nothing to look around this is it just this tiny little thing and a decent USB type-c cable and you're good to go now it does get warm under usage especially if you're performing any benchmarks or you're doing anything particularly taxing all the heat builds up around this top area here so it can become a little bit warm on the old crotch obviously that's less noticeable when you're using it in the dual screen mode now fortunately that heat generally doesn't make it to this lower display it always remains pretty cool to use there's a slight area right in the middle which does warm up compared to the rest but it still stays relatively cool to the touch so it's still nice and comfortable to use the fans do kick in quite quickly especially on the high performance mode as well but they are really quite quiet so they're not too distracting or too noisy or too obnoxious or anything like that so what else is there to mention well the Wi-Fi is dualband Wi-Fi 6E and there's Bluetooth 5.2 the latter allows you to enable the Le audio for lower latency and improved battery life if your Bluetooth device supports it as well in terms of ports on the right hand side there's a fullsize HDMI 2.1 port and an audio combo Jack while on the left we've got one USB 3.2 gen 1 type a port and two Thunderbolt 4 type c Port both of which are capable of supporting fast charging and up to 40 gbit of data transfer speakers are by Harmon Cardon they're downwards facing and they sound okay they're nothing too special to be be honest they do get loud but the louder they go the more tinny they become and the less bass so they're fine they're serviceable they're pretty typical laptop [Music] speakers there's also a 1080b webcam above the screen and you can use that to log in Via Windows hello it's fine for a quick meeting or a video call but don't expect too much more than that there's no privacy cover or switch though unfortunately which is a bit of a shame so how much does all of this cost well it's listed currently this exact model for a smidge under 2 Grand £ 1,999 which two grand is still a lot of money don't get me wrong but by today's standards and considering the hardware I don't think is too bad at all so I think that pretty much covers everything and overall I'm a big fan of this laptop while it's not the most powerful laptop ever it's powerful enough enough for most people's needs efficient too and any faults you do find are quickly forgotten when you set up this just look at it having a dual screen workstation like this anywhere you go it's just too bluming useful thanks for watching take it easy I'll see you next time

Channel: MrAlexTech

Views: 19,779

Keywords: MrAlexTech, Mr Alex Tech

Id: JysBcRb0V-c

Length: 19min 17sec (1157 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 08 2024