Dual-screen laptops already exist, but they're mostly niche products like the Lenovo Yoga Book C930, with an e-ink display instead of the keyboard, or the upcoming HP Omen X 2S 15, with a small 6-inch secondary screen for fiddling with settings or chatting with game opponents.

With its new ZenBook Pro Duo, unveiled at Computex this week, Asus is thinking about dual-screen laptops in a whole new way. The company has essentially plastered every available square inch of the inside of the ZenBook Pro Duo with a touch screen. There's a 14-inch 4K OLED touch display where laptop screens typically go, and then there's another 14-inch-wide display above the keyboard.

The result? The ZenBook Pro Duo is essentially a rolling, giant screen with a small gap in the middle and a keyboard below. Asus let us spend a few minutes with it in advance of Computex, and we were impressed. This machine is clearly a wild experiment, but its absurd amount of screen real estate results in nearly equal parts bling and actual utility.


That's a Lot of Pixels The ZenBook Pro Duo's main screen is a 4K OLED display, with a native resolution of 3,840 by 2,160 pixels. The ScreenPad Plus (the skinnier screen) itself is located forward of the keyboard and south of the main display. It also has a 4K-width resolution, but it's shorter in the other dimension (3,840 by 1,110 pixels) and isn't an OLED screen.



The ZenBook Pro Duo will also come with a separate wrist rest and stylus (shown above). Since the laptop is so big, its keyboard is significantly raised off of your desk, so the wrist rest will come in handy for added typing comfort.

Room to Scroll In its most basic functional sense, the ScreenPad Plus extends the ZenBook Pro Duo's vertical space, so you can see much more of a webpage as you scroll than you could with just a single laptop screen.

Please Touch Scrolling is very natural, and you can accomplish it in a bunch of ways: tap on either the ScreenPad Plus or the main display, or use the touchpad or keyboard arrow keys.

Launch Apps on the Left The main benefit of so many additional pixels? The capability of displaying mini apps. The ScreenPad Plus has its own launcher, which displays icons of the apps you've got installed on your PC in an arrangement that will be very familiar to people with Android smartphones. To access this launcher, you swipe in from the left edge of the ScreenPad Plus.

Customization Options In addition to offering app shortcuts, the ScreenPad Plus can also remember custom layouts of various app windows (accessible by tapping the icon that's second from the top in the left-most column shown above). Since setting up everything requires a bit of time, this shortcut will come in handy for people who always have the same apps open.

Drawing Your Own Path You can draw on the ScreenPad Plus with the included stylus, or use it on the main screen. During the brief time I spent with the ZenBook Pro Duo, I found it much easier to draw on the horizontal ScreenPad Plus than the vertical main display. The ScreenPad Plus can also handle character recognition: Write a word, and it can be translated into text in another app on the main display.

Three Windows Side By Side I suspect many ZenBook Pro Duo owners will want to experiment with cramming as many elements onto the ScreenPad Plus as they can. Above, you can see what it looks like with three separate, equally sized apps: a map, a calendar, and a calculator.

Switching Among Apps Switching through apps and positioning them on the screen is simple for smartphone users, as well as Windows users (the good old Alt+Tab app-switching feature). Instead of Alt+Tab, you'll use a gesture to bring up the ScreenPad Plus app switcher, from which you'll see all the open apps. From here, you will have the ability to close or rearrange each one.

Off-Center Viewing: Variances Because the ZenBook Pro Duo uses different display tech for each of its screens, they don't look exactly the same when viewed from an angle. The OLED main display looks bright and vivid from any angle, while colors on the non-OLED ScreenPad Plus tend to fade a bit when you move your head to the side.

Right Side View When you do look at the ZenBook Pro Duo from the side, you're reminded just how large this thing is. We don't have exact measurements yet, but suffice it to say that this thing stands well above the 0.6-inch height of most mainstream premium laptops sold these days. Also, you'll spot lots of cooling vents to handle all the heat that the Intel Core i9 and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 generate inside.

Left Side Ports More vents are evident on the left side, along with an HDMI output, a USB port, and a power port. The view above also demonstrates how the ErgoLift hinge tilts the keyboard base slightly toward the user when the laptop is open.

A Gap in the Middle As impressive as the ScreenPad Plus is, it's not quite as seamless as a folding screen, which other manufacturers like Lenovo are currently trying to put into a laptop . With the ZenBook Pro Duo, you'll still deal with a sizable gap between the top and bottom displays. On the plus side, this adds room for extra vents to keep all the components cool.

Back View From the back, the ZenBook Pro Duo looks like many sleek ZenBook Pro laptops that have come before it. The display lid nicely hides this laptop's massive size.

Coming Soon Unlike the very early "Project Precog" dual-screen prototype that Asus showed off at Computex last year, the ScreenPad Plus is ready to go into production. It will appear first on the ZenBook Pro Duo, followed by a smaller ZenBook Duo, which is scheduled to go on sale later this year. Pricing has yet to be announced.

Asus ZenBook Pro Duo

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