Blessed with a second display, the Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED is perhaps the ultimate notebook for habitual multitaskers.
While notebook PCs generally get thinner, lighter and more powerful, the tried and true clamshell design doesn’t tend to change much over the years. You place your notebook on the table and fold up the lid to discover a display at the top and a keyboard and trackpad below. Simple but effective.
Attempts to mess with this formula have met with limited success over the years. Way back 12 years ago, the original Acer Iconia 14-inch notebook sported two screens and no physical keyboard. Instead, it relied on an onscreen keyboard and trackpad on the bottom screen – meaning you were always forced to type on an unrelenting slab of glass. It was a fascinating concept, yet a horrible user experience if you do a lot of typing.
Perhaps learning from Acer’s folly, Asus’ Zenbook Duo range launched in 2019 with a more sensible compromise. Instead of abandoning the physical keyboard, it shrunk it down. Above the keyboard sits a half-sized secondary screen which acts as a fully functional second display. You can move windows between the screens, and even extend them across both, just as if you’d plugged in an external monitor as a second screen.
Asus continues to hone the design with the new Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED. While Asus has put a lot of thought into the practicalities of working with a half-sized secondary display, the overall user experience means that it’s not for everyone.
Review: Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED
First impressions
Dual screens
The Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED is a little thick and heavy, but that’s forgivable considering its premium spec sheet and fancy screens. Lift up the lid and you can instantly see where Asus has gone to a lot of effort to make working with that second screen as smooth as possible.
For starters, as the main screen swings up the secondary screen also rises so it’s on a 12-degree angle (higher than previous models). Slightly improving the angle makes it a bit easier to see what’s on the screen, and there’s very little colour shift despite the viewing angle.
This angle also raises the top of the secondary screen closer to the bottom of the primary screen, reducing the gap between them to make it more of a seamless experience to work across the two.
Look underneath the notebook and you’ll find two clever folding feet which prop the entire unit up on an angle, if that suits the way you work.
The primary 14.5-inch screen offers a 2,880 x 1,800 resolution and 16:10 aspect ratio, with the HDR OLED display offering an exquisite picture surrounded by a thin bezel.
Below it, the secondary screen is the same width but obviously not as tall. At 10 centimetres, it’s less than half the height of the primary screen, leaving you with an awkward 30:9 aspect ratio.
They’re both touchscreens and Asus includes a stylus, although there’s no space to slot it into the body of the notebook when you’re not using it.
It’s worth noting that the secondary display isn’t an OLED, so it isn’t as vivid. Asus has also given it a matte finish, along with the keyboard and trackpad, so it doesn’t offer up too much glare from overhead lights.
Thankfully, the secondary screen behaves like a fully-functional Windows display, so you can configure it in the System Display menus. When you drag a window to the secondary screen it’s easy to adjust it so it takes up all or half of the screen. Via the ScreenPad Plus software, Asus has also added a few pop up tools which make it easier to move windows around and resize them, including a floating taskbar on the secondary screen.
Options for the smaller screen include adding an onscreen number pad, multimedia controls and other options which change depending on the application you’re using. Dive into the settings and you can even turn the entire secondary screen into a large touchpad.
When you find the perfect layout for a certain task or workflow, you can save it as a preset so you can call it up quickly and get down to work.
There’s a dedicated button for switching all the open windows between the two displays, so you can easily jump between working in different applications on the main screen. Of course, you might already do something like this using Windows’ multiple desktop feature. That also works here, with each Windows desktop holding different windows on each physical screen.
There’s also a dedicated button for disabling the secondary screen, which you might need to discover yourself if for some reason the secondary screen fails to wake up when you boot up the computer.
Keyboard and trackpad
Here the Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED also makes a good first impression but, the more time you’ll spend typing, the more frustrating you’ll find the user experience.
The keyboard is compacted so it only takes up the bottom half of the space, to leave room for the secondary screen. Realistically, this doesn’t make a major difference to the size and spacing of the keys, as keyboards are normally restricted to the top half of the space to leave room for a decent-sized trackpad.
Of course, the problem is that you still need to squeeze in a trackpad somewhere. Asus has opted to shoehorn it in on the right, which leaves the keyboard on the left. At first glance, this seems like a sensible compromise, until you start typing.
If you type a lot then the location of the Delete, Return and arrow keys are probably hardwired into your muscle memory, on the right of the keyboard. Start typing on the Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED and you’ll soon find yourself accidentally hitting that trackpad, or worse yet the power button above it.
The fact that the trackpad is also not the usual location also makes it less intuiative to use. Althogther this makes for a very slow and cumbersome typing experience, even if you’re generally a fast and accurate typist. I started writing this review on the Zenbook but it was taking so long that I relented and switched back to my trusty MacBook Pro.
The small size of the narrow trackpad also makes it cumbersome to move the cursor around on the widescreen display. The lack of a wrist wrest will also bother some people.
In theory, if you used the Zenbook all day, every day, you would grow accustomed to it. Especially if you relied on a standalone mouse rather than the trackpad. But if you’re the kind of person who tends to jump between computing devices, you might be continually frustrated with the Zenbook
Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED specs
| Display primary | 14.5-inch, 2.8K (2880 x 1800) OLED 16:10 aspect ratio 120 Hz OLED panel |
| Display secondary | 12.7-inch ScreenPad Plus (2880 x 864) 120 Hz IPS panel |
| Operating System | Windows 11 Home or Pro |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-12700H Processor 2.3 GHz (24M Cache, up to 4.7 GHz, 6P+8E cores) (Up to Core i9 12900H) |
| Graphics | Intel Iris Xe Graphicsoptional NVIDIA GeForce optional RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU4GB GDDR6 |
| RAM | 16 GB LPDDR5 (up to 32 GB) |
| Storage | 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 Performance SSD |
| Ports | 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A2x Thunderbolt 4 supports display / power delivery1x HDMI 2.1 TMDS1x 3.5mm Combo Audio Jack1x DC-inMicro SD Express 7.1 card reader |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi 6E(802.11ax) (Dual band) 2*2 + Bluetooth 5 |
| Front camera | 720p HD, with IR for Windows Hello face authentication |
| Audio | Smart Amp TechnologyBuilt-in array microphoneharman/kardon (Premium) with Cortana voice-recognition support |
| Stylus | ASUS Pen 2.0 SA203H-MPP2.0 support |
| Battery | 4020 mAh, 76WHrs, 4S1P, 4-cell Li-ion |
| Weight | 1.75 kg |
| Dimensions | 32.35 x 22.47 x 1.79 ~ 1.96 cm |
Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED features
Screen and keyboard configuration aside, the Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED has the kind of spec sheet you’d expect from a premium notebook in this price range.
The Intel Core i7 powerplant ensures that there’s plenty of the grunt under the bonnet, accompanied by 16 GB of LPDDR5 RAM. That grunt should come in handy, considering that the most likely use cases are for high-end content creators (which we’ll get to in a minute) who will also appreciate the PCIe 4.0 Performance SSD storage.
The primary display’s exquisite OLED picture with Dolby Vision support is assisted by 100 per cent DCI-P3 colour gamut and up to 550 nits peak brightness. It is accompanied by Dolby Atmos sound and a four-mic array – with two front and two rear for 360-degree audio capture. There’s also AI-noise cancellation for distraction-free calls and conferencing.
All that considered, you might have expected a little more graphics grunt than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti, which is no slouch but still the entry-level model of the RTX 3000 series.
You’ve got plenty of connectivity options with a USB 3.2 Type-A port, two USB-C style Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI 2.1 output and a 1x 3.5 mm Combo Audio Jack. Some people might lament the lack of an Ethernet port, but you have Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac at your disposal along with Bluetooth 5.1.
Unfortunately, the battery life is underwhelming, which isn’t surprising considering that it needs to power two screens. Don’t expect to get a full day’s work from it, although it’s handy to have the ability to turn off the smaller screen when you don’t need it to save some juice.
Usefulness
The Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED is an impressive piece of hardware but the big question is: what would you do with it? You need to be making good use of that secondary screen in order to justify the price tag and overlook the frustrations of the keyboard and trackpad.
It’s hard to see a solid use case for wordsmiths. The second screen is too small to be practical for displaying most documents, unless you only need to see a small part of the document and not the entire page. The keyboard will also likely slow you down when you’re on deadline. You’ve the option to turn the entire secondary screen into a handwriting recognition surface for the stylus, if you’d find it useful.
The same goes for knowledge workers, looking to write reports, edit spreadsheets, create presentations and access email. Even if you get a productivity boost from a dual monitor set-up in the office, the Zenbook’s secondary screen is probably too small to allocate to any of those tasks. If you’re going to use the dedicated button for quickly switching windows between screens, it would be just as easy to jump between different desktops on a standard Windows notebook.
You could argue that the secondary screen is useful for keeping an eye on things, whether it’s work-related or simply watching sports on the side while you do something else. You might even push a conference call down to the bottom screen while you get things done. The extra-wide aspect ratio perhaps makes it practical enough to sit two apps side-by-side, assuming they’re still larger enough that you can see what you need to see.
That said, for most people, it would be more practical to rely on notifications for staying informed, or to simply sit a smartphone or tablet next to your standard notebook.
The Zenbook’s two screens seem most practical for creatives working with applications that are broken into multiple windows, such as audio, video and image editing software. The content could take up the entire primary screen, while the timeline, palettes and other tools resided on the secondary screen – similar to the way many creatives already use a desktop dual monitor set-up.
GadgetGuy’s take
The Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED is an impressive piece of engineering, but it’s still the classic solution looking for a problem. Asus’ efforts to make it easier to work with dual screens might make it a practical solution for some people, but others will find it more trouble and expense than it’s worth.
It’s certainly not for everyone. But if you’ve always dreamed of carrying a dual monitor set-up in your carry bag, and you can live with the compromises that this demands, then the Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED might be the notebook you’ve been waiting for.
Would I buy it?
No, not unless I was absolutely sure that the secondary screen would deliver me more productivity benefits than I lost through the awkward keyboard.
The post Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED review: seeing double appeared first on GadgetGuy.
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