Asus Zephyrus Duo 15 preview: the coolest laptop innovation we’ve seen in years – MSPoweruser

As the spread of COVID-19 just started to crawl its way throughout Great Britain, we took a train from the West Midlands of England all the way down to London to see the newest innovation from Asus’s impressive Republic of Gamers team: the Asus Zephyrus Duo 15.

Amid the hypochondria and the terrifying act of coughing train passengers removing their face masks, we did make it to ROG’s humble showing at London’s Loading Bar in Dalston. Everyone met, albeit at a social distance, and exchanged a variety of non-handshake greetings: acknowledging head tilts and clothed elbow bumps took lead as the most popular greetings. If you couldn’t tell, this was possibly one of the last gaming press events before COVID-19 closed pretty much everything.

It was a small gathering: in the back a table draped with a white cloth covered all the devices we were granted access to. My curiosity hoped that the manufacturer’s adoration of RGB lighting would give away shapes, sizes and, well, anything. Needless to say, the smartypants folk at ROG had thought of everything. No unintentional sneak peaks for me.

Once the tablecloth was unceremoniously peeled away from the table in an effort to both saucily reveal ASUS’ new piece of tech and not launch the library of multi-grand devices onto the wood-paneled ground, it was immediately apparent which device every journalist in the room wanted to get at: the Asus Zephyrus Duo 15.

We get why: despite other laptops being in the same room, the Asus Zephyrus Duo 15 is a crowd gatherer; this is a laptop guaranteed to get looks if you whip it out at a Costa. Well, if a day to Costa ever exists again.

It’s mostly due to the Asus Zephyrus Duo 15’s killer feature: inheriting both the automatic hinge of the last-generation Zephyrus and the chassis-integrated ScreenPad Plus of the ZenBook Duo has led to an innovative laptop that stays cool, looks cool and just is cool.

Lifting the laptop’s lid just a smidge awakens both the top and bottom high-resolution screens; continuing to part the two halves lifts the bottom ScreenPad Plus to a small slope. It’s an awesome look that always manages to impress: it’s also pretty damn fun to play with.

While the lifting screen is useful for cooling and all that technical mumbo jumbo, the practicality of the bottom touch-capable screen in a high-performance machine makes this the most impressive and innovative device we’ve seen in years. After what feels like years of nothing but standard laptops, it’s awesome to see ROG continue to experiment.

As we lightly toyed with the Asus Zephyrus Duo 15, under the supervision of ROG representatives to make sure we didn’t do a Project Valkyrie, we couldn’t help but think of applications for the bottom-screen. Our torrent of questions awesome were always answered with the same word, “Yes.”

Anything that supports two monitors can be used on the ScreenPad Plus. There’s no need for specially designed software, there’s no need for source ports to take advantage of the awesome bottom screen. This isn’t Apple’s MacBook Touch Bar, this isn’t the Wii U – they really don’t like that one – this is something that just works.

From video editing to graphic design and, of course, gaming and livestreaming, the Zephyrus Duo’s ScreenPad Plus offers more versatility for everyone. What was once envisioned with the lower-powered ZenBook Duo can now be a reality. With a 10th Gen Intel i9 and an RTX 2080 SUPER bringing unparalleled performance, there is no holding back. This is a device to watch.