Asus, the leading computer manufacturer, is launching its high-end laptop Asus Zenbook Pro Duo in the Indian market soon. This laptop was announced earlier this year at Computex. The most notable thing in this laptop is the secondary display that aims to improve productivity. I got this device to try and here are my first impressions of it.
Asus Zenbook Pro Duo comes in a big box. When I first saw the box, I felt like there’s a cabinet inside not a laptop. The box includes a laptop, 230-watt charging cable, charging adapter, hand-rest, and a stylus.
As soon as I opened the lid, I saw a unique kind of laptop where there was a big secondary screen above the keyboard. It has a full-size backlit keyboard. There’s no space left below the keyboard, so the company offers a hand-rest separately. When you want to use the laptop for typing purposes, put the hand rest.
The touchpad is located on the right side of the keyboard. This position feels awkward initially because we are used to working with the touchpad located below the keyboard. Mostly finger automatically goes there. The touchpad supports up to four-finger smart gestures. The touchpad has a dedicated button to convert it into a numeric keypad.
At the right, it has 1 USB C port, audio jack, and a USB 3.1 port. The power jack, HDMI and USB 3.1 port are at the left. Surprisingly the SD card slot is missing that may disappoint creators.
The laptop has proper spaces around to keep airflow for cooling purposes. It has vents at both sides and comes with ErgoLift function that props up the base of the laptop. The laptop weighs 2.5kg but feels heavy. It is also thick.
It has a 15.6-inch OLED touch panel offering 3840 x 2160 resolution. The display offers true colors that makes it excellent for video editing and graphics related work. The laptop comes with an Asus Pen, so you can use it for handwriting or drawing.
The secondary 4K display is edge-to-edge offering 3,840 × 1,100 pixels resolution. It has an ultra-wide aspect ratio where you can pin two apps side by side. So, you can have 3 apps running in front of you at the same time. You can drag and drop app icons from the primary display to the secondary display. you can also move apps from primary display to secondary or vice versa with a single tap.
It packs 9th Gen 2.4GHz octa-core Intel Core i9-9980HK processor with up to 5.0GHz Turbo Boost. The laptop has 32GB of RAM and there’s also NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 with 6GB GDDR6 VRAM. So, it offers high-end performance and is suitable for video editing, photo editing or any other kinds of heavy tasks. You can also use it to play computer games. The laptop feels really fast. I haven’t got much time to test the performance properly, but initial impressions are really good. Apps open quickly, everything is really smooth. I also installed a video editing software to edit a small 4K clip and it finished the task faster than my expectation.
Asus has also taken care of audio as it packs the ASUS SonicMaster stereo audio system with surround-sound. There’s Array microphone with Cortana and Alexa voice-recognition. Alexa for Windows is not yet available in India, so you can use it for Cortana.
It has an IR webcam with Windows Hello support. The advantage of IR webcam is that it works even in low light.
It has Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 for wireless connectivity.
The laptop packs 71Wh 8-cell Rechargeable battery that claims to offer up to 7 .5 hours of battery life. I will talk about battery performance in the final review that will be coming soon.
This laptop is a treat for video editors because it offers an excellent multitasking environment and powerful specifications. The powerful eight-core Core i9 processor, 32GB RAM color-accurate OLED 4K panel and secondary screen that brings more control options.
The laptop will be launched in India on October 17. So, I still do not know the price, but I expect it to be launched at a price somewhere around Rs. 2 lakh.
I am still using this laptop and checking everything properly. The review of the laptop will be coming soon. If you don’t want to miss that, subscribe to our email newsletter and follow us on different social media platforms.
