This is an upcoming device from Asus, it's their Zenbook 17-fold, and what makes it special is the way that it folds and unfolds I know what you're thinking every laptop folds right but not like this one, it doesn't so in its folded shape. It is a regular 12 or 13-inch screen-sized laptop, it's pretty compact but when you unfold it you are presented with a huge 17-inch OLED panel and this is unlike any device I've ever seen. So it's not a tablet it's a laptop computer, it's got a big 17-inch screen but it comes with a keyboard and you can use it as a fully functional laptop. Now the device itself could be used as a tablet if you wanted to.
You could hold it as a 17-inch monster tablet or you can just place it down on the table if you want to use it with a pen and just do art stuff on it fully functional in that manner as well but the real magic is when you fold this thing so you can fold it in this position where you're kind of using the device as a double screened device but because this hinge can hold pretty much any position, you can position and orient this panel to whatever you want to use it for. So you can have a show that's running across both sides of the panel or you can have a show on the top and then like some work or some other document that you're working on on the bottom.
It is very versatile but it also comes with this keyboard so this is a Bluetooth keyboard so you can use it as a regular wireless keyboard, you don't have to have it connected or anything it just functions as a perfectly normal Bluetooth keyboard but here's the crazy thing, if you're in like a tighter space and you don't have the option of setting it up nice and wide, you can put it onto the device where it attaches magnetically and windows will reconfigure the UI. So that it looks like a regular laptop and now you have a laptop experience and this is just like a slightly thick laptop but it's a laptop and then when you want the big screen experience again you just pop open the kickstand and then you're good to go now.
This panel is nice it's a 17-inch OLED panel, it's 4x3 aspect ratio, it's bright, it's got punchy colors, it's awesome for consuming media, it does have a fairly glossy screen, so you do have to be careful that if you're using it in really bright environments but it does have a crease right down the middle of the screen it's fairly subtle in terms of the visual imperfection but because it's a tablet and sometimes you'll be running your finger across that crease you can feel it when you're moving your finger around.
One thing to note though this screen is rated for 30,000 fold cycles, now the idea of like 30,000 fold, sounds I mean it's a lot right, if you folded this device four times a day you could probably get like 20 years I mean that's like open and closed that's one fold cycle you do that so eight folds per day you could get 10 years of folds on this device, it's good in that sense but if you compare it to like a phone those are rated for like 200,000 cycles and maybe the difference comes from the fact that it's a bigger device and when you open and close this computer it's putting more stress on a hinge compared to a phone or maybe they just didn't design the hinge in the same fashion so the dust can get in a little bit easier.
I don't know but it does make you think that this is probably a less durable folding mechanism than one of the flagship phones out there. So the screen has this rubber bezel that runs along the perimeter of the device and I'm assuming it's to kind of protect the device as you open and close it but then on the back of the device the way this hinge works there's this protective covering that slides back and forth as you open and closes the device.
Now I can't open this device it's a pre-production unit but on Asus's website, they're saying it's running an i7 1250 u which is a low wattage 12th gen chip from intel, it's also running 16 gigs of ram and a terabyte of PCI e4 storage and I think these are good specs for a universal configuration and lastly it's running a 75-watt hour battery, which on a device of this size is decent, I don't think it's going to have huge battery life but if I had to guess with my regular testing I'd say I'd guess like six hours of battery life.
There are two thunderbolts 4 ports on the device, there's one on the top and then one on the side and there's also a webcam that supports infrared for logging in with facial biometrics but this is the first device I've ever had in here that was a laptop that had a folding screen and it's a very different experience than I thought it would be like so I've seen videos and pictures of stuff like this before and it always looked cool but having gotten this thing in I to think what sells this for me is the size of the screen.
