Asus Zenbook Duo 2024 review

What we absolutely love is the fact that the Duo looks like a ‘sleeper’ laptop. Conventional on the outside, but it will blow your mind once the lid is open. Unlike the Fold, this one closes flush without any seams or gaps thanks to the cleverly integrated keyboard unit. The outside is typically Asus, proper metal and feels absolutely stunning to touch and feel.

There’s no denying the fact that having two huge displays adds to the weight and the thickness, so don’t expect it to be lightweight. The Duo weighs 1.65Kgs which is sort of equivalent to a full fat gaming laptop, but still is quite manageable day-to-day and it helps that the charging brick is no larger than a regular smartphone charger.

Open the lid and it’s a pretty sight. The keyboard, mousepad and the entire unit looks just like a normal laptop would and it doesn’t even feel weird or out of place. You’d use it as you’d use a normal laptop. Pull the magnetic keyboard away though and that’s when the gorgeous 14in OLED comes to life! It works brilliantly together and the keyboard connects to the unit via Bluetooth and charges itself via magnetic pins placed at the bottom of the unit.

Turn it around and you’ll find a beautifully crafted stand that you could pop out to make the Duo stand vertically to make a 16:10 format or lie it on its sides to make it look like a book. It takes a bit of trust and confidence to work the Duo in vertical mode, but it works and doesn’t wobble or move around when you prod at the screen.

You get the Asus pen bundled with it but there’s no place for it on the laptop to attach. No magnets or anything. That’s the only thing we thought of in terms of ‘negatives’.

What’s better than a beautiful 14in 1920x1080 60Hz OLED panel with 500nits of brightness? Two of them! Both the panels are drop-dead gorgeous in terms of colour, contrast and response. Images have the typical pop and the colour accuracy is bang on! The panels get full sRGB and DCI-P3 coverage. We’ve been fans of Asus’ application of the panel and the experience shows here as well.

The 500nit brightness is in a boosted HDR mode, otherwise the number peaks at 400nits, which is still plenty bright to work indoors. You can control the brightness of each display individually as well which comes in very handy when you use the secondary display for input, be it editing/sketching or just as a normal keyboard as well.

The speakers on the other hand are just okay. It’s a regular laptop sound output that’s got no body or definition truly. It can get loud enough but push it beyond 60 percent and it starts sounding shrill and causes fatigue. We used our headphones throughout the testing phase.

The Zenbook Duo gives you a lot of options with the second screen. You can opt for a normal keyboard, touchpad, a writing pad and jumble up the combinations. All of this may sound quite intimidating, but Asus has done its best to make it sweet and simple with finger gestures and taps.

When it comes to typing on the display itself, it’s a bit of a lifeless experience. We love to use a mechanical keyboard when typing out long reviews, so no feedback and a flat tough experience doesn’t really make the cut. It’s great for quickly making a few edits here and there but we wouldn’t use it to write something extensive. The more practical use case scenario would be editing shortcuts and sliders for apps like Adobe’s suite or even Davinci and the rest.

The physical keyboard on the other hand is typically Asus. Extremely intuitive to type on although we did find that it has a more shallow key press than we’re used to from other Asus keyboards. It’s still pretty good to type on and has illuminated keys which is a brilliant touch as most of us write in the dark dungeons of the world. With that being said, when separated from the Duo, it lays quite flat on your table which isn’t ideal and becomes slightly awkward to type on. The trackpad is proper full sized, and works brilliantly.

We’ve had a slew of laptops with the new Intel Ultra chips and the Zenbook duo offers the Intel Ultra 7 and the Ultra 9 options in India. Our unit came with the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H chip which is blinking fast. The regular Zenbook 14 features the Ultra 7 chipset and this one feels considerably quicker and more capable. The boost in efficiency also helps battery life, which considering two OLEDs is a win!

The 16-core chip with 32 gigs of RAM is just potent. It’s more than capable of handling basic editing tasks in Photoshop, however throw something more demanding and the Zenbook Duo gets considerably toasty, limiting the usage. The performance is on par with our resident M2 MacBook Air and it makes us feel that the Ultra 7 chipset would be more than enough for medium tasks.

The Arc integrated GPU puts out similar performance as we’ve seen before. Older titles work well while something heavy like Cyberpunk struggles at 25fps. It’s by no means a gaming laptop but can churn up an enjoyable experience for light gaming sessions. As far as the NPU’s go, as we’ve said before, it’s just sitting on its old wicker chair, still twiddling thumbs as most of the processes are still handled online.

The Duo has a 75Whr battery is quite a beast in a 14in laptop but with two screens, it evens out to normal numbers. We got a cool 8 hours of usage with regular use and the keyboard on. Without the keyboard the number drops to 3 -4 hours depending on what you use it for. It helps that the charging brick is the same size as a smartphone charger.

The Zenbook Duo takes the regular laptop’s practicality to a whole new level. With the addition of the second screen, it becomes like a proper thin all-in-one PC that’s portable and powerful, almost giving you the same experience as a regular work desktop would. Of course, there’s no real gaming chops or customizability options, but to have a device like that quickly turn into a productivity powerhouse and then turn into a regular laptop and then seamlessly fin in your bag without breaking your back is a win.