Gadgetory

so laptops with two screens are now a thing and this is the Zenbook pro duo this is the first laptop that of use that had a full width screen I mean there's the touch bar from Apple but this is like an actual usable screen and when they first announced this thing I think the thought that ran through a lot of people's mind it was is this a gimmick or is this actually gonna bring functionality and this is what this video is about like how usable is the screen now just to get this right out of the way Asus includes a bunch of kind of built-in applications and a built-in UI for the secondary screen it's cool that they made custom apps for this display but they didn't feel useful to me I found that the real value of this bottom screen was just using it as an extended screen or just like a second screen for your computing experience the thing I wanted to use this device for was for video editing I use Adobe Premiere and the idea was to run the application so that it would just basically stretch across both screens and it would run my timeline on the bottom screen because when I edit videos I usually stare more at the image instead of the actual timeline and I found it to be useful but there are a few things you should be aware of first you have to adjust your workspace so that it fits into these two windows but you have to understand that this bottom panel does not have a great viewing angle from your regular sitting position you do have to look basically flat down at it so you don't want you have your really important stuff down there you want your critical work up top and kind of like your supplementary work at the bottom the other thing is that in Adobe Premiere if you want to view something in full-screen you hit the tilde key and it'll fill up the whole screen the problem is the program now thinks the top and the bottom panel are the full screen so the image is now stretched across both screens it's something that I could personally work around but I think for some content creation that might be a bigger issue but the whole idea of having two separate screens that have extra real estate for your workflow is really nice and this works for any kind of content creation and whether it be Photoshop Illustrator or any kind of creation of work we want to have a lot of stuff on your screen this is nice now the second thing I thought that this double screen setup would be useful for is for just multitasking so you can have YouTube running and like a web browser and read it or just have multiple windows running so you can monitor multiple things at the same time now as for how useful that is I really think that depends on what you're using those screens for if you're just browsing the web I don't think this is worth the extra money over a normal laptop but if you're using it in terms of like having reference material on one screen and then typing on the other screen like doing some kind of publication then yeah I could see this being useful but in terms of just multi paneled workflows it's not bad the last scenario I thought this could work for is for gaming now this isn't a dedicated gaming laptop it's a pretty powerful system it's running an eight core Intel CPU and an RT X 2060 so it's got some powerful components but the idea was to run a game on the main screen and then have info on the bottom screen like you can have build guides or discord or twitch if you're a streamer you could just run whatever you want on that second screen but the issue I found with this particular scenario is that the game that you're playing in because these are 4k screens you can't easily switch between them unless your game is running in 4k and this system isn't great for 4k gaming so the scenario of gaming on this device and using that secondary screen for something is cool it sounds great on paper but I just found that it was difficult to actually make it a worthwhile experience I think most people are better off buying a regular gaming laptop and then plugging up a secondary screen to the device so with all three scenarios I found video editing to take advantage of this bottom screen the most readily but it's still not a perfect situation the biggest issue is the angle of the screen it's not like when you're viewing from top it's weird to kind of glance down and then back up to what if you're looking at so you really need to run just secondary info on that bottom screen I do kind of wish that this screen would pop up a little bit like there's already a bit of lift from the ergo lift mechanism but I wish it would just tilt up a few degrees more so you could see it more easily but that's what we have now speaking of ergo lift when you open and close this laptop there is a mechanism to raise the back of the laptop to help with air flow so this screen just by nature of its position makes it more difficult to cool this device than a regular gaming laptop because this screen is sitting on top of the hottest components the CPU and GPU are right underneath here and to compensate for that they have to do this ergo lift system and they're pulling air from the sides and underneath the laptop to cool this they've done an adequate job when I'm running renders there's no thermal throttling but when I'm playing games after like 40 minutes it does throttle a little bit granted this is not a gaming laptop and this is just an engineering sample but actually think they could have run these fans a little bit harder it's a pretty quiet system even onload okay just a quick review for the rest of the device it's a 15-inch laptop but it's not super thin for a performance laptop it's on the thicker side but it's the secondary screen and the way they have to cool this thing because of that screen that gives it that extra thickness the screens are really nice the top is an OLED panel at the bottom is an IPS panel if you're worried about OLED burnin like we've seen on phones I don't think it's as big of an issue on laptop screens maybe they're not running them as bright but the few burnin tests that I've run on these devices I'm not seeing any issues so I feel relatively confident purchasing OLED screens right now the keyboard is shifted down obviously they've done this to fit that secondary screen the typing experience is OK they include a wrist rest but even typing without that wrist rest is perfectly fine it's just that the keystrokes are a little bit shallow their 1.4 millimetre travel the track pads on the right and this is something have to get used to but I think most people using this device are going to be running an external Mouse so battery life on the system I was hitting 4 hours a little bit less than that it's a 71 watt hour battery it's not a huge battery and I'll be honest I thought the battery life would be shorter but 4 hours is not bad on the inside you also have access to the Wi-Fi card it's running the new Intel Wi-Fi 6 chip and you also have access to the nvme but the RAM is soldered on so you have to figure out at the time of purchase how much RAM you want because you cannot upgrade that on this system the port selection is also fair there's two UPA's one Thunderbolt 3 and that's basically if there's also an HDMI port but in terms of USB connectivity is just those three it's usable but for a laptop that's geared towards creatives I would like to have seen an extra port or maybe two the speaker's sound nice though it's a Zen book they often have good speakers now if you're looking at this device and you're wondering should I actually get this like is this something that's gonna fit my workflow the one kind of suggestion that I would have is if you're someone that could benefit from extra screen real estate on your laptop then consider this but keep in mind that be as the screen is on a weird viewing angle you need to be someone whose workflow doesn't require both of your screens to have perfect viewing angles this bottom screen is useful but it's best when you put secondary information on it or some kind of like reference material or stuff that is important but not as important as the stuff that's on your main display so reviewing a product like this is difficult because when you put your mindset into the average user that might actually consider this usually there's no like learning curve when it comes to using a product but for something like this you actually have to sit down and like if I bought this thing if I spent the money to buy this device I would spend the time to customize my workflow and customize my workspace to make it fit this dual screen device but if you don't do that it's difficult to really maximize the usability of this thing like you do need to learn its nuances and figure out how to fit into your workflow to make this device really worth the money but if you can make it fit I think for those people it's a cool device okay hope you guys enjoyed this video thumbs would be liked it subs we'd love to see you guys next time