Gadgetory

hey how's it going Dave 2d here so this is the 2018 Zenbook pro and this is a device that gets updated pretty regularly by Asus like every year there's some kind of iterative change to this thing but this year in 2018 they brought something that was well I think this is the first true innovative laptop technology that I've seen in quite a while so every year we're seeing like things like thinner bezels better materials lighter materials thinner laptops which are cool and everything but they don't really change the way that we actually work with our laptops right there they're nice upgrades and stuff like that but this is different this is a screen that's built into the touchpad so you can run it as a screen pad thing where you're running basically Asus apps and an Asus interface so you can pull it down and you'll see stuff like your calendar a number pad so this keyboard doesnt actually have number pad but you can use the number pad feature on the bottom thing a calculator and you have your Spotify music player and you have other apps that Asus can develop and put onto this screen pad interface now you can also run as a secondary display which is actually pretty cool so it essentially is a smaller secondary screen that you can just kind of use to drag-and-drop your programs or your windows folders or whatever you would use your secondary display for now Mac like the Apple Mac books they have that touch bar at the top and I said this in my original review but the utility of that strip like the actual functionality of that strip is pretty limited and it's highly dependent on the developer so you need Adobe or whatever app you're using you need those developers to create functionality in that strip for the user which is cool but it's not nearly as functional or even practical as something like this screen pad so I've only been using this device for a couple of days and my initial reaction was wow that's really cool like you know what can I do with it but then like the secondary immediate reaction was that is it really that useful because like your viewing angle on this thing isn't ideal right like if you're staring at your screen like you normally would now you have to glance down to look at this secondary screen but after using for a little bit it just it feels natural not that it's like a better option than looking straight if there are two screens in front of you that would be ideal but I mean that's never gonna happen on a laptop anytime soon this starts to feel useful after even a couple hours of using it if you're loading a premiere you can have like different it's down there if you want to watch videos like twitch or YouTube you can pop that window down there and it's just in a position where you can kind of keep tabs of whatever's going on on the screen without actually having it take the real estate of your regular screen it's nice and you can run whatever application you want in this so if you have like a security camera footage or if you're running a remote access program like whatever you want you can just make it work and that's the thing like when I first saw this thing your brain just goes right to that thing like there's just something that you can imagine something that you can think of that has utility in this setup with that MacBook Pro it was more like you had to imagine it you kind of had to think about you know how could I use this if the developer did it right this it's immediate it kind of it makes sense when you stare at it so how's the rest of this device it's well it's a Zen book it's built pretty well it's not as well built as a goodell XPS product or a macbook pro but i like it the color it's like this blue they also have different colors I imagine but the one I'm looking at is this kind of navy blue with copper trim and it also has your standard Zen book texture to the metal now the screen is a 4k panel 83% screen to body ratio the color gamut is great 100% Adobe RGB 100% srgb this is supposed to be color calibrated at the factory with Pantone certification it's a nice looking screen it's not super bright though it's bright but it doesn't achieve the same kind of peak brightness as a MacBook Pro and I keep bringing them up as an example because I mean this is a very very good product for content creators and you can see the similarities in terms of like product category so the keyboard feels kind of standard like your Zen Book Pro keyboard slightly mushy ER keys than I would want but good layout and good keyboard overall the port selection is a little bit weird so they have a micro SD I really wish our device like this especially because obviously geared towards content creators that they would include a full-size SD it's not there it's got to use bas too thin about 3s and an HDMI out so to get into the inside it's like your standard Zen book thing flip it over remove a bunch of screws this one I've removed in advance seemed to pop it off here we go okay so first thing I noticed was that there's only two heat pipes and because it's running some pretty powerful hardware I was hoping there'd be more turns out there's a third heat pipe that runs underneath the motherboard so on the backside of it that'll help cool this down the i9 is a beast it's running on gtx 10:50 TI and the ponens in here are cooled by two fans that are supposedly upgraded from the previous generation so they're supposed to have like thermoformed plastic and just have better air flow and stuff I haven't be able to test it out thoroughly because this is an engineering unit I haven't been able to run proper benchmarks but the preliminary results are good this thing's not throttling but the temperatures are a little warm hopefully it does get better before it goes into retail again this is just an engineering sample so the RAM is soldered onto the board I really don't like that on a device like this at which you could just kind of upgrade it when you want it it only comes out up to 16 gigs of ram from the factory and it's just baked right onto the board so that's not the best thing the SSD and the Wi-Fi card can be replaced so the battery's down here I haven't really done battery tests on this because it's just there's probably ton of software that's gonna go into the retail version that's not on here yet the speakers they're good and they've always been good Zenbook pro speakers have always been one of the better ones on the market and yeah I feel like this is gonna change the way that some people use their laptops I love that little screen it's useful for a lot of people it's obviously not for everyone the best part is that the functionality of the touchpad or the trackpad itself doesn't get reduced like it feels exactly the same as a regular trackpad like you wouldn't be able to tell the difference in fact if you turn off the screen it just looks like a black trackpad it's got that smooth textured glass with good tracking the trackpad is sunken in a little bit more than your average trackpad but you don't notice that when you're using it I don't know it's really cool to me what do you guys think like do you think you could make use of it obviously you could watch like movies and stuff on this but aside from that like do you guys think you would use something like this if you had access to it on your trackpad like do you find a gimmicky do you find legit I don't know now in terms of battery life I don't know how this affects it again I'll have to test this in the future but yeah kind of like an early look at what I could consider one of the more innovative pieces of tech I've seen in laptop store this year ok hope you guys enjoyed this video thumbs if you liked it subs you loved it see you guys next time