The panels themselves are both excellent – great viewing angles, good color reproduction, and plenty of pixels to fill all 11.6 inches — but this doesn't seem like the right way to marry a tablet and a laptop. For one thing, it means the laptop doesn't go to sleep when you close it by default; it just pauses for a second and then illuminates the external display. You have to turn it off using the power slider every time, and the close-the-lid-and-walk-away muscle memory took a long time to undo (you can change this in settings, but then it's awkward to switch between modes since everything goes to sleep). And lest we forget, adding a screen to the chassis means there's a screen on the outside — I can't overstate how unconsciously precious I became about caring for the Taichi while I was testing it. There's no good reason for my OCD, as far as I can tell — I used the device as I would any other, and the outside screen has no scratches or dings to show for it — but I can't stop being overly careful with the Taichi, because it just seems like something I need to be careful with.

The part that really kills me, though, is that the internal screen isn't a touchscreen. Every single time I opened the Taichi, usually because I needed the keyboard for one reason or another, I tried to touch the screen. I'd tap three or four times before remembering that this screen doesn't work via touch, and then get used to mouse and keyboard again. Of course, then I'd close the machine, get used to touching it again, and have the same problem all over. I'm sure touch was sacrificed in the name of weight and thickness, but that was a bad call on Asus's part.

One good call Asus made was to add pen support to the outside screen, which quickly became the primary reason I used that display. The implementation is a lot like the Surface Pro — it works for gestures and pointing, and has an on-screen indicator when you're nearby so you can tap exactly the right spot. It's a little laggy on the Taichi compared to the Surface Pro, and took a beat to catch up to me whenever I drew or wrote quickly, but it still worked fine. There's nowhere on the device itself to put the pen, which means I'm going to lose it sometime in the next 45 minutes or so, but until then it's a nice thing to have.

Asus makes you need both screens by only giving you certain functionality with one display or the other. But if the Taichi just had a single screen, with touch and pen functions built in, it would be far more useful and far less frustrating. I spent an inordinate amount of time switching display modes so I could draw on the screen, then switching again so I could type, then accidentally closing the laptop and resetting the display modes again. This whole infuriating process could be solved by just having one screen, and aping Lenovo's or Dell's way of letting you transform the device from laptop to tablet. This feels like lazy design, the result of Asus's inability to figure out how to design an actually transforming product.