Asus announces a (real) dual-screen laptop, the ZenBook Pro Duo

Asus has revealed a truly dual-display laptop, the ZenBook Pro Duo, and we can confirm that it’ll come to South Africa at the end of August 2019. Asus unveiled the device at the Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan, which kicked off today.

Last week HP announced that its ‘dual-display’ gaming laptop will come to South Africa, except its secondary display is a small, 6in one above the keyboard… in other words, it’s a little like having a smartphone screen between the keyboard and main display. Asus has taken the double-screen idea further with the ZenBook Pro Duo and made a laptop with a 15.6in 4K monitor (3840 x 2160 pixels) up top that continues into a 14in (albeit, squatter and more rectangular, 3840 x 1100 pixel) 4K display above the keyboard.

Gimme more

The best part? When it comes to specs this machine doesn’t hold back at all (more on that below). The ZenBook Pro Duo is fully capable of running intensive design applications and is intended for on-the-go users who want to multitask wherever their digital nomadism talks them. It’s for people who love a secondary display but for whom lugging one about is, you know, impractical. Users will be able to, for example, use the main display to edit video while keeping Explorer windows of the files they need on the secondary one.

The top panel is OLED, meaning colour rendition should be super accurate. Asus is calling the secondary, LED display the ‘ScreenPad Plus’, and like the primary screen it also supports touch input. The ScreenPad Plus doesn’t function independently from the main display as the ones on previous models have. This time around, it’s an extension of the main display, and apps can be dragged from the one display to the other. You can also run full apps on it as you’d do with a conventional display. Sneaky Netflix sessions at work? Hells yeah.

Inside, the ZenBook Pro can be kitted out with up to a 9th Gen Intel Core i9 CPU, a monster Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 GPU and Wi-Fi 6. You know what that means, gamers? You can also choose to fit it with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD. Look out noobz, here comes a fraggin’.

We’ll have a full review of the ZenBook Pro Duo for you before the local launch date, and you’ll be able to get one yourself from August with pricing starting from R40,000.