Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Dual-Screen Laptop Comes To 2022! ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED Review”.
This video is sponsored by surf shark when apple announced its new macbooks. This week i watched that announcement on a computer that does things no macbook can yup it’s the newest zenbook pro duo from asus and it. Let me follow along with apple’s announcement, while tweeting and taking notes on two separate screens that live inside the same petite portfolio. I don’t say that to score easy points with windows fans. In fact, if anything, this new zen book amplifies the similarities between asus and apple, each manufacturer is refining what worked on its last generation of laptops sanding over the rough edges to drop something fresh for 2022, and the result in this case is a familiar zenbook that Still manages to take dual displays to a new level. You’Ve just got to be cool with the compromises. For some reason, i was more acutely aware of those compromises when reviewing this year’s zenbook pro duo. So, let’s start with those. As with all these, asus made room for the 12.7 inch second screen by bumping the keyboard right down to the edge of the chassis, and that means, if you’re typing, on a tabletop, you need to push the machine further away to make it feel natural.
Now, that’s not a problem even on a compact cafe table but find yourself in a situation where you need to use this laptop on your you know, lap and you’ll end up doing what monica chin calls typing like a t-rex in her review for the verge same Goes for airplane tray tables, if you don’t have enough room to push back. This is not a fun machine to type on that’s compounded by the offset trackpad, as always, which is still narrow enough to feel quite confining, and it doesn’t have the useful, hidden numpad that other asus machines enjoy. Yes, you can still use the screen pad as a stand-in trackpad, but that’s about as awkward as it looks. The mouse buttons feel like they use the same switches as the main keys, which to me means they’re, not clicky enough to be mouse buttons, and the arrow keys alongside them are still too tiny.
For my taste for video calls. There are truly useful features brought over from prior asus models like the ai noise cancellation, i’m using to try to tamp down the echo in this room. But it’s mighty tough to appreciate those when they’re paired with this truly mediocre 720p webcam.
And while it’s nice to have a dedicated key to turn that camera off, you don’t get the reassurance of a physical cover to go with it, as you do on the space edition zen book, i reviewed a few weeks back while i wish asus had spent the Last year fixing some of those minor issues. They are just that minor. Instead, the company put its focus on making the best feature of the zenbook duo, even better to do that.
It continues the trend of making that second screen more visible. We went from no lift back in 2019 to 9.5 degrees last year to 12 degrees for this model, if you do want even more tilt, asus includes something that reminds me of the novel folding charger box. It shipped with the space edition a pair of stick-on folding feet that prop the whole machine up for you. I love little bonuses like this. The company recognizes the ergonomic sacrifice it’s asking users to make and it does what it can to mitigate them. I dig that almost as much as i dig, the new fingerprint resistant finish that corrects an earlier complaint of mine and asus revised starfleet ready logo.
Now this is easy to miss if you just focus on the screens so come down here to desktop level and you’ll, see just how significant this hinge redesign is see the main display a bright and beautiful oled. This time around is actually hanging from this drop hinge off the screen pad both displays essentially floating on these stilts according to asus. That provides almost 40 percent more airflow to the redesigned cooling system underneath which lets you push the system to a combined 85 watts of thermal design power across the cpu and gpu respectively. A 12th generation intel core i9 and an rtx 3050 ti laptop in performance mode.
Those fans definitely aren’t quiet, but it’s worth it still riding the high of top gun maverick. I plugged in my hotas and treated myself to a few sessions of star wars, squadrons and microsoft. Flight simulator, the squadrons played like a dream, even at ultra settings, and while i had to settle for medium on microsoft, flight simulator, it was still gorgeous and it ran very smoothly. And here the screen pad came in useful in a way that will be familiar.
If you’ve seen my earlier reviews of dual screen laptops, i used it once again as a cheat sheet to remember what those 50 plus buttons and switches on my joystick and throttle do speaking of buttons. The microphone mute came in handy when i found myself in a game chat session without remembering how to turn it off pretty much. My only complaint was having to break out a dongle for my flight controls, since the machine was light, one usb-a port, but hey, it still provides one more than a lot of laptops. Do these days, oh, and for once i didn’t need to use headphones to enjoy the sounds from the cockpit.
This year’s speakers are much louder and fuller, of course, for real gaming. You want to look to this pc’s bigger brother, the rog zephyrus pro duo 16, which i’m still in the process of reviewing the zenbook’s power, is better used for creative professional work and asus was thinking of those folks when it bundled something else in the box as Well, a specialized active stylus. Now i’ve had a strangely high number of documents to sign over the past few weeks ago. I actually could have made use of this, but because there’s no garage on the laptop to house the stylus, i ended up forgetting it at home. More often than not, like i always say, a stylus is only as good as its silo still to come, my biggest complaint and my final thoughts, which i’ll get to right. After this you know, my favorite sponsors are companies whose products i would use, even if they weren’t sponsors and i’ve been using surf shark for nearly as long as mr mobile has existed, surf shark is an award-winning vpn that i used to use to protect my privacy On open wi-fi networks in hotels or coffee shops – and i still do that, but more and more i find myself using it to just make the internet better. Those pop-ups you get on every website these days well surf shark blocks them. Your favorite shows are only streaming in a specific region, surf shark unblocks, those and while i don’t keep its ad blocker turned on because after all, i rely on ads like this one to survive.
Well, some websites just take it way too far with ads that are actually malware or fishing schemes in disguise. Surf shark drops the block hammer on those too, so make your internet better, get surfshark at the link in the description and use code. Mr mobile for 83 off and three extra months, free thanks to surfshark for sponsoring this video. I said at the top that you’ve got to be ready for compromise when it comes to a machine like this and here’s.
A few more windows, 11 is quite slow to wake from sleep on this machine, and it’s even slower than windows. 10 was at catching its breath after you add or subtract a screen. What that means is that swapping desktops between the top and bottom display or giving the screen pad a break entirely almost always carries with it a delay that can stretch up to 10 seconds now. Why would you ever want to turn off the halo feature of this one-of-a-kind machine? Well, that’s my biggest complaint, those brighter ips and oled touch screens the 12th generation intel silicon and that discrete graphics card they all suck a lot of power, and the result is that this isn’t a five and a half hour machine like last year’s model.
It’S more like a three and a half hour, one yeah, even with a unremarkably light office workload even with the performance mode set to prioritize endurance and even on a day where i spent the first hour of that run time with the screen pad totally turned off. When you have to turn off your computer’s biggest differentiator in order to make it through half a workday, well, the only bigger bummer than that is asus. Continuing to sanction this particular buffoonery from a little company called mcafee, whose pre-loaded fear-mongering suite spams you every day. Sometimes multiple times a day until you give them money or just uninstall the damn thing, and yet, as i close the lid on this machine, i can’t help seeing the parallels to another couple devices that also don’t last as long as they should last summer’s galaxy. Flip 3 from samsung and motorola’s older razer, 5g pack, plenty of compromises versus their conventional contemporaries battery life chief among them. Yet i forgive them indeed. I love them enough to use them nearly every day because they provide a user experience and a degree of fun that no other phone can well. That, too, is the case with this particular zenbook pro duo.
While it may not pass the one-handed opening test, it does pass the brent haven collins test, which is to say it’s petite enough to fit in my favorite single laptop messenger bag. That’S a really small bag and the fact that it can do that, while still providing a useful and refined implementation of dual displays on a laptop. It’S impressive, if you’re the kind of mobile multitasker who needs added acreage on the go.
Well, the only better options. I can think of also come from asus and they’re also called zenbook produce, just be sure. You also remember to pack your charger or that you add a usbc battery pack to the 1999 price tag.
This video was produced following three weeks with the zenbook pro 14 duo, oled model ux 8402 ze review sample provided by asus. As always, the manufacturer was given no early preview copy approval rights or editorial input of any kind. If you want to see a different product from the same company and present it in a decidedly different kind of review, check out my rocket launch review of the space edition zenbook from last month, please subscribe to the mr mobile on youtube. If you’d like to see more videos like this until next time from michael fisher, thanks for watching and stay mobile, my friends, you .