ASUS Zenbook Fold 17
Earlier at CES at the beginning of the year, it was actuallypublishedThe Zenbook 17 Fold OLED, now officially debuted at IFA. The main difference is that although there was an engineering prototype for us to take pictures when it was published before, the ASUS staff took great care of the machine. In fact, we were not allowed to operate it except for the appearance of shooting. And now after nearly nine months of adjustment, it is clear that the 17 Fold is almost complete, and we can also let our reporters play at will.
ASUS Zenbook Fold 17
ASUS isn’t the first with a foldable laptop like the 17 Fold — Lenovo’s Thinkpad X1 Fold will be available as early as September 2020 —— But ASUS believes that the screen of the X1 Fold is too small, and the screen size of the Fold 17 is reasonable. It is equipped with a 17.3-inch panel with a resolution of 2,560 x 1,920 (4:3), and each half is 12.5 inches with a resolution of 1,920 x 1,280 (3:2) when folded, taking into account the general business notebook when folded. size, and when opened, it has a nearly desktop experience.
ASUS Zenbook Fold 17
Other hardware components include a Core i7-1250U processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD, which, as you can see in the picture above, is designed with the motherboard on one half and the 75Wh battery on the other. ASUS said that this design can take into account heat dissipation (thick enough to install active heat dissipation) and the difficulty of routing.
ASUS Zenbook Fold 17
But even so, the design of the foldable notebook is destined to be extremely thin. Although it is only 87mm thick when flattened, the thickest part after folding is almost three centimeters thick, more like a thick book.
ASUS Zenbook Fold 17
In addition, another embarrassing point is that the 17 Fold only has two USB-C ports. In this regard, ASUS said that the 17 Fold is set to be used by business people rather than creators, so the configuration equivalent to a thin and light notebook should be enough, and the 17 Fold can also connect more peripherals through Bluetooth. One of the wireless peripherals is naturally its keyboard. This keyboard is actually almost the size of a normal 13-inch laptop keyboard. The keystroke depth is acceptable, and the touchpad is quite large. The only regret is that the four-directional keys are too small. .
ASUS Zenbook Fold 17
Unlike the first contact with the 17 Fold before, this time we can freely try its various usage modes. The most basic one is “Laptop Mode”. When the keyboard is magnetically attached to the lower half of the notebook (the one without webcam is below), the lower half of the screen will automatically turn off, and Windows will also retreat to the upper half.
ASUS Zenbook Fold 17
If you remove the keyboard at this time, the lower half of the screen will be lit, and you can choose to use it as a whole elongated screen in the lower right corner of the screen, or cut it into two halves to use it, becoming a concept similar to Zenbook Duo .
ASUS Zenbook Fold 17
In the absence of a keyboard, swipe up from the bottom edge of the screen to call up the virtual keyboard. The key size of this virtual keyboard is OK, but because there is no feedback, it is quite difficult to touch type.
ASUS Zenbook Fold 17
If you turn the laptop into landscape orientation, Windows will also automatically follow the turn, and will also ask you in the lower right corner if you want to use it as a full screen (“tablet mode”) or split in half (“book mode”). As a tablet, 17 inches is really too big, and its weight (1.5kg for the body, 1.9kg for the keyboard) is not so good to hold as a book.
ASUS Zenbook Fold 17
Therefore, the most suitable landscape mode is to use it as a desktop similar to AIO. Use the built-in stand on the back to support the body, and then use it with a wireless keyboard and wireless mouse, you can have a desktop that is quite close to the desktop. Use experience.
ASUS Zenbook Fold 17
Overall, the experience of using the 17 Fold is not too unexpected, but during the trial play, the system was able to place the screen correctly after opening and closing it several times, which still shows that ASUS should have spent a lot of effort on tuning. However, we are playing a clean demo machine after all, and the future use in real life will be a bigger test.
ASUS Zenbook Fold 17
As a new type of product, it is expected that the Zenbook 17 Fold OLED will be a little more expensive, with an estimated listing price of NT$129,000. As the technology of large-scale folding screens becomes more and more mature in the future, there will be more notebook power plants to launch such products, but if you want to experience the refreshing feeling of opening a 12.5-inch notebook and turning into a 17-inch notebook, the 17 Fold is expected to be the fourth Season will be available.