If you need the ability to work anywhere without compromising on screen space, the Asus Zenbook Duo is in a class of its own

By now, you might have thought Asus's 2024 Zenbook Duo would have inspired a wave of copycats. With Lenovo's slightly earlier Yoga Book 9i, it pioneered a new folding laptop form factor, with dual OLED touchscreens united by a hinge, with a physical keyboard resting on the surface of the lower screen to make it look like a standard clamshell.

Lift the keyboard off, and you reveal a second screen, which could actually be supported on the integral stand to give you two screens, one above the other. Or, if you preferred, you could flatten the screens and use them horizontally to give you a squarer, side-by-side format for productivity and entertainment. It might look like an ordinary 14in laptop, but it had the flexibility and big-screen usability of a larger desktop replacement system.

It's a smart design, and the initial Duo was a great device, slightly hamstrung by a few minor errors and the weaknesses of Intel's Meteor Lake Core Ultra architecture. Last year, Asus fixed those by switching to newer Arrow Lake H chips, and this year, we get further refinements and a shift to the brand, spanking new Panther Lake platform. The result? The Zenbook Duo folding laptop formula is pretty much perfected.

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Asus Zenbook Duo (2026): Design

The new Zenbook Duo follows the design principles of the old one, but with some tangible improvements. The casing now uses the same Ceraluminium materials as we've seen on other Zenbooks, giving you a tough aluminium construction with a durable and attractive ceramic-style finish. Even in a dark grey that's more professional than exciting, it looks great.

More importantly, while the dual-screen design still works in the same way, the new Zenbook Duo comes equipped with a re-engineered 'Hideaway Hinge.' Most of the body of the hinge has been cleverly recessed inside the unit, both strengthening the join between the touchscreens and reducing the gap between the screens by 70%. This makes a surprisingly big difference when you have the two screens in the horizontal side-by-side format, as there's just 7.6mm between them rather than 25.3mm. The gap remains visible and a bit annoying if you're watching a video or working in design applications in one window spanning both screens, but it's still much more immersive. As a bonus, it makes the chassis as a whole 5% smaller.

Closed up, with the keyboard in position on the lower screen, the Zenbook Duo can still feel like an oddly chunky 14-incher, over 23mm thick and 1.65Kg in weight. Yet it's still compact and light, and unfolding the screen is still one of the coolest party tricks you've seen a laptop do. You can even use it without the keyboard, using a virtual keyboard on the bottom touchscreen, should you wish to, by tapping a shortcut in Asus's ScreenXpert applet. It's workable this way and makes the Zenbook Duo feel even more like a cutting-edge, sci-fi device, though the lack of tactile feedback takes some getting used to.

If there's a downside of the design, it's the impact on connectivity, with just two Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports, an HDMI port, and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A. One Thunderbolt 4 port and the HDMI on the desk are unusable while the screens are in their horizontal, unfolded position. This is a slight pain if you're charging the laptop, as your only USB port will be occupied. Still, that's not much of a problem with this year's model, as we'll see later. For wireless connectivity, you can rely on Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

Asus has also made some tweaks to the keyboard module. It still sits flat on the lower screen and charges via an unobtrusive pogo pin connection, but the battery life has been boosted to give you between 11 hours and 52 hours, depending on the backlight settings. The keys are fairly flat with only the slightest indent, but the action is nice, solid, and consistent across the keyboard, with a generous 1.7mm of travel that makes it easy to type on, whether on the unit or detached.

When detached, it has a completely flat profile, which might affect your comfort if you're spending hours working, but that's sort of intrinsic to the overall design. Meanwhile, the touchpad is reasonably large, very smooth, and close to perfect in terms of sensitivity. It's also hard not to be impressed at how seamlessly the whole thing switches from a physical connection to a wireless one and back again. It only occurred to me after hours of use that I hadn't even had to think about it; it just works.

Asus Zenbook Duo (2026): Display

Having two screens already gives the Zenbook Duo an advantage. You've got so much more screen real estate than on an ordinary laptop, and both the horizontal and vertical setups are brilliant for serious multitasking. You can have a productivity app on one panel, a browser or another app in the other, and work between the two just as you might on a big desktop screen or a multi-monitor setup.

However, what really makes the difference is that both screens are fantastic. The 2880 x 1800 resolution and 144Hz max refresh rate give you a clear and stable image, aided by the usual perfect contrast of OLED tech. The SDR brightness level maxes out at a superb 489.2cdm2. Colours are wonderfully vibrant, and you can switch between Natural, Vivid, Manual, Eyecare, and E-Reader modes using the MyAsus app. The last mode simulates the muted colors and low-glare style of an e-ink screen, though you need to dim the brightness and tinker with the settings to really see the effect. You can also quickly switch between color gamuts, which is handy if you need to work in a specific color space, such as sRGB or DCI-P3.

If so, you can expect superb coverage; the top screen covers 100% of sRGB with a 162% gamut volume, 90% of Adobe RGB with a 112% volume, and 100% of DCI-P3 with a 114% volume. Color accuracy is excellent, with a Delta-E of just 0.62 in Natural mode with the color space set to sRGB. What's even more impressive is that the bottom screen is so well matched to the top, coming within 1% or 2% of the same figures across our colorimeter tests. This helps sell the impression that you're looking at a single screen.

The sense of big-screen immersion is matched by the sound. The speakers don't go incredibly loud, and there are limits to the bass it can deliver, but at low to medium-high levels, the output is first-rate, with high levels of clarity and some warmth and depth to the tone.

If there's any disappointment, it's that the 1080p Webcam, complete with Windows Hello IR capabilities, isn't quite up to the level of the rest of the device. It's OK in good lighting, but in poor or artificial light, the image can grow fuzzy or even blotchy, with an unfortunate watercolor effect.

Asus Zenbook Duo (2026): Performance

While the external improvements make this year's Zenbook Duo stronger, it's the internal changes that have the most dramatic impact. This is the first laptop we've tested with Intel's new Core Ultra X9 388H: a high-end entry in the Panther Lake family.

With four P-Cores, eight E-Cores, and four Low Power Efficient Cores, it can run 16 threads at speeds of up to 5.1Ghz, and acts as a sort of best-of-both-worlds processor, giving you the energy-efficiency and single-core performance of Lunar Lake with the improved multi-core speeds of Arrow Lake. Crucially, it also packs a 50 TOPS NPU alongside Intel's ARC B390 GPU, packing in 12 Xe3 cores, which are a step up from the Xe2 cores found in Lunar Lake.

In our test configuration, the Core Ultra X9 is backed up by 32GB of DDR5 RAM and one very speedy 2TB Samsung PCIe 5.0 SSD, with sequential read/write speeds of 7044MB/sec and 5891MB/sec. It's a potent combination. In Geekbench 6, the Zenbook Duo is one of the fastest laptops we've tested. Its scores of 2900 (single-core) and 16920 (multi-core) don't quite match those of the HP ZBook Ultra G1a with its 16-core Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (2905 and 18083), but they're impressive given that this isn't a workstation-class laptop. It's slightly ahead in multi-core performance of the Asus ProArt P16, with its 12-core Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and 64GB of RAM (2925 and 15192).

They're also significantly better results than we saw with previous-generation Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake processors. The same applies in the PC Mark 10 Modern Office benchmark, where the Zenbook Duo's score (7213) puts it ahead of any Lunar Lake benchmarks, not to mention most of the Snapdragon X and AMD competition we've seen in the last year, except the ProArt P16.

It's a similar story with more demanding tests. I don't have data for the ZBook Ultra G1a in the Cinebench 94 benchmark, but the Zenbook Duo's scores of 127 (single-core) and 929 (multi-core) are much higher than we saw with Lunar Lake devices, and while the ProArt P16 beats the multi-core performance with 117 and 1156, it's still impressive that the Core Ultra X9 388H can get so close.

It's with the GPU performance, however, that Panther Lake impresses most. Sure, the ZBook Ultra G1a is still unassailable, thanks to the 40-Core Radeon 8060S GPU built into the Ryzen AI Max+ 395. It scores 83,532 in Geekbench 6's OpenCL GPU benchmark, compared to 56817 from the Zenbook Duo. However, the latter still comes in far ahead of previous Lunar Lake laptops, the M4 MacBook Pro, and anything we've tested without a Ryzen AI Max+395 or a dedicated GPU. In the 3DMark TimeSpy and Steel Nomad benchmarks it scores 7140 and 1343 respectively. The Lenovo Yoga 9i, with its Core Ultra 7 258V Lunar Lake CPU, scored 4050 and 818.

And, just in case you're interested, the ARC B390 GPU is capable of running Doom: The Dark Ages at an average 45fps on Medium settings with a 1920 x 1080 resolution, or at 57fps with Intel's XeSS upscaling in Performance mode. That's a fantastic effort for an integrated GPU, even if you need to switch to the laptop's noisy Performance cooling mode in order to get it. Expect a racket, and a lot of hot air from the vents.

Now for the really big surprise. Given how good Lunar Lake was for battery life, we didn't expect much of an improvement from Panther Lake, especially given that it has more cores and a bigger GPU at work. Well, the massive 99Wh battery helps, but the Zenbook Duo survived an incredible 25 hours and 55 minutes of playback in our HD video rundown test with one screen active, though this dropped down to 13 hours and 28 minutes with both screens up and running. Even with two screens, you should comfortably get through most of a working day without a recharge, and the result with a single screen is extraordinary. What's more, you can recharge to 43% in 30 minutes using the 65W charger provided.

Asus Zenbook Duo (2026): Is it worth it?

With prices starting at £2299.99, the Zenbook Duo is an expensive laptop, and you're not so much paying for the performance as for the dual-screen flexibility. It's a laptop you can still fit in a bag and use as a standard clamshell effort, but that can magically transform into a big-screen productivity or creativity beast when you need one, even when you're away from your desk.

Not everyone needs this, and if you spend most of your time at one desk, then you're probably better served by a more conventional device plugged into a desktop setup with a monitor and mouse. But if you need the ability to work anywhere without compromising on screen space, the Zenbook Duo is in a class of its own. This year's design tweaks and extra processing power make this more true than ever. It's a superb, hugely versatile machine.

Asus Zenbook Duo (2026) specifications