Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Asus’ new laptop has a touchscreen trackpad”.
( rock music ). How many screens does your laptop have? Because if you have the new Asus ZenBook Pro, you actually get two., That’s right. The ZenBook Pro has two screens on it., Even though it’s this very traditional clamshell style laptop.. Now, as you can see, Asus actually put a full color touchscreen in the track. Pad., It’s basically a 5.5 inch, 1080p smartphone screen. That’S turned on its side and embedded right into the track pad.. Now this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this idea., But this is the first one that you can actually go out and buy.. This isn’t a concept device or custom built. Machine.
Asus is actually selling this thing. And if you really want to, you can buy it.. Now I say if you really want to, because you really shouldn’t buy this laptop., It’s just not a great computer, crazy, trackpad screen aside. The panels are flexible.
It’S covered in fingerprints in seconds the battery life is abysmal. And even though it has Core i9 processor, the poor thermal management means you don’t get to take advantage of all that power.. It’S basically not something. You want to spend 23 hundred dollars on., But the trackpad here now, that’s interesting..
So let’s talk about it. Now Asus is calling it the ScreenPad. And it functions as both a standard Windows, 10, precision, trackpad and a touch screen.. It has a smooth matte finish and it supports all of the standard.
Multi-Finger gestures you’d expect on a modern Windows computer.. You can even turn the screen part off entirely and use it just like you would any other trackpad., But if you do use it as a touchscreen, there’s few different things you can do with it., You can use it to control music playback as a calculator as An app launcher, or even in place of a number pad., There’s a calendar mode that syncs with the Windows 10 calendar app. So you can see upcoming appointments. If you’re using an Office app like Word or Excel, the ScreenPad will pull up a customized toolbar.
That gives you quick access to things like font, styling, layout tools, spreadsheet functions and more.. My favorite thing that the ScreenPad does is give me quick controls. When I’m watching a YouTube video in Chrome., I can adjust the volume toggle captions go full screen and even skip ads right from the trackpad.. Perhaps the craziest thing you can do with this is extend your main Windows display down to the trackpad..
So it’s like the world’s smallest secondary computer display.. Now that’s wild, but I don’t know why you would ever do that., Because the buttons and labels and text are just way too small.. Now you might be wondering what happens to your cursor control when you’re using the ScreenPad as a full screen toolbar., And it turns out nothing actually., The ScreenPad. Still, let’s you move the pointer around and click just like a normal trackpad., Even when it’s displaying a full screen. Toolbar. Now there’s some things that don’t work all that well here., But they could be fixed, really easy., There’s apps for controlling both standard music. That’S on your hard drive and to control Spotify, which is pretty cool. But for some reason, Asus removed all of the standard media controls for play, pause and skip from the function row of the keyboard.
So to quickly pause, music or skip a track. You have to either switch to the full Spotify app or go down to the ScreenPad, select the app you want and then tap to skip or pause or play or whatever.. It’S super cumbersome and it feels like it was designed to force you to use a ScreenPad. Instead of the much easier way that exists on like every other computer. And though tracking is pretty good and the multi-fingered gestures work well, the whole ScreenPad itself is kinda loose and wiggly when you touch it or click on it., Which makes the whole thing feel a Lot cheaper than its 23 hundred dollar price tag would imply., But aside from those issues which I think are all pretty easily fixable, I actually really like what Asus did with the ScreenPad here.. Now it doesn’t interfere with the way you expect a standard trackpad to work., But it does add, convenient shortcuts right at your fingertips.
Whenever you need them. Now, obviously, there’s not a lot. You can do with this. And there’s plenty of room for improvement and new features and apps and integrations and things like that., But the basics are here and they’re done pretty well. Now, hopefully, next time that Asus tries this idea, it puts a ScreenPad in a better Laptop., Hey thanks for watching.. Now this laptop is pretty futuristic., But what’s really futuristic is the whole house we built for our Home of the Future series.
Go check them out at YouTube.com/TheVerge. .