Gadgetory

how many screens is your laptop have because if you have the new Asus Zenbook Pro you actually get to 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 a soos actually put a full-color touchscreen in the trackpad it's basically a 5.5 inch 1080p smartphone screen that's turned on its side and embedded right into the trackpad 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 a custom built machine Asuza is actually selling this thing if you really want to you can buy it 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 bismal and even though as a Cory 9 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 $2,300 on but the trackpad here now that's interesting so let's talk about it now soos is calling it the screen pad and it functions as both a standard Windows 10 precision trackpad and a touchscreen 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 a 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 screen pad will pull up a customize toolbar that gives you quick access to things like font styling layout tools spreadsheet functions and more my favorite thing that the screen pad does is give me quick controls when I'm watching a YouTube video in Chrome I can adjust the volume toggle captions go fullscreen and even skip ads right to track that 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 it's wild but I don't know why you would ever do that because the buttons and labels and texts are just way too small now you might be wondering what happens to cursor control when you're using the screen pad as a full-screen toolbar and it turns out nothing actually the screen pad still lets 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 easily 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 a soos 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 screen pad 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 screen pad instead of the much easier way that exists on like every other computer and no tracking is pretty good and the multi-finger gestures work well the whole screen pad itself is kind of loose and wiggly when you touch it or click on it which makes the whole thing feel a lot cheaper than its $2,300 price tag would apply but aside from those issues which I think are all pretty easily fixable I actually really like what a suits did with the screen pad 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 a soos tries this idea it puts a screen pad in a better laptop hey thanks for watching now this laptop is pretty futuristic but what's really futuristic it's the whole house we built for our home of the future series go check them out at youtube.com slash The Verge