The trackpad, though, is a major issue if you've been spoiled by the enormous touchpads on most ultraportables. The keys themselves offer a decent amount of travel and feedback.

The keyboard is a bit cramped and uncomfortable to use without a built-in wrist rest, though I got used to it after a few hours. One major downside to the ZenBook Duo is that, once again, ASUS had to shove the keyboard and trackpad below the ScreenPad Plus. As it stands you can use the function keys for the main display and the ScreenPad Plus's touchscreen settings to deal with brightness individually. I just wish ASUS included a way to change the brightness of both screens simultaneously. You can definitely tell that it's of a higher quality than the ScreenPad Plus - it supports 100 percent of the SRGB gamut - but the fact that both can reach 400 nits of brightness makes it easier to pretend as if they're one single display. The ZenBook Duo's main 1080p 14-inch screen looks great as well, with plenty of brightness and vibrancy to make videos and photos pop. Most of the time, it was a combination of YouTube and Spotify on the ScreenPad Plus for easily controlling media (and a nice way to sneak in my favorite YouTube channels while working). Instead, I typically had a web browser or a productivity app like Evernote up on the main screen, while two other apps sat below. Technically, you can run three tiny windows side-by-side, but I found that too small to be useful. But it's still a bit too short for many apps. It also lasted 11 hours and 40 minutes in our battery test, which is close to many ultraportables, though five hours less than the XPS 13.įor the most part, I found the ScreenPad Plus to be a lot more useful than last year, simply because I could see it better. Its vastly improved PCMark 10 and Geekbench scores make it clear that Intel's Tiger Lake hardware is a major upgrade. More important than games, though, is the ZenBook Duo's raw computing power. NVIDIA's MX450 should offer more GPU power, but I haven't been able to test that yet.

I didn't have a chance to do much gaming on the Duo, but that score alone makes it clear it'll be able to play a low-impact title like Overwatch. Intel's Xe graphics also proved worthy, scoring nearly 4,000 points higher than last year’s model in 3DMark Night Raid. But I was still able to run dozens of browser tabs, Evernote, Slack, Spotify and YouTube across both screens without any trouble.ĪSUS ZenBook Duo (2021, Core i7-1165G7, Intel Xe)ĪSUS ZenBook Duo (Core i7-10510U, NVIDIA GeForce MX250)ĭell XPS 13 (2020, Core i7-1065G7, Iris Plus)ĪSUS ZenBook 13 (2020, Core i7-1065G7, Iris Plus) To be honest, I'd really only recommend the Duo with 16GB of RAM to really maximize your multitasking potential. Our review unit featured an Intel Core i7-1165G7 CPU with only 8GB of RAM, but it still felt snappy as I juggled multiple apps at once. Despite seeming like a quick branding opportunity, the Zenbook Duo lived up to that Evo badge in my testing.

Asus zenbook duo 2021