Announced earlier this year at CES, the ASUS Zenbook DUO (2024) UX8406 is launching this month in Australia with dual 14 inch 3K 120Hz ASUS Lumina OLED displays in a lightweight body that includes a detachable keyboard. 

The Zenbook Duo line has a respectable lineage with ASUS since they first introduced the concept of a secondary display with the Zenbook Pro Duo in 2019. 

The latest Zenbook Duo brings everything and the kitchen sink to the table when it comes to specs. The first is the dual 3K resolution ASUS Lumina OLED touchscreen displays, then under the hood there’s an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor with ARC graphics, 32GB LPDDR5x RAM and a 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD.

Priced at $3,999 and going on-sale today, the Zenbook Duo offers up the specs and form factor to be a true mobile workstation. I’ve spent the last week with the Zenbook Duo and here’s how it went. 

Hardware and Design

The ASUS Zenbook Duo is surprisingly compact when you take it from the box, with the whole unit, including the stored keyboard just under 2cm thick. 

The laptop comes in an Inkwell Gray colourway with the ASUS monogram logo emblazoned across the top, and a simple Zenbook branding in the corner. It’s a fairly simple look that won’t garner much attention – until you unveil the dual displays. 

The build quality is excellent with very little, if any flex. The base of the unit includes rubber feet to raise the unit slightly off the desk, as well as a very convenient, and extremely sturdy, well designed yet compact kickstand.

The kickstand hides away out of sight when not in use, yet can easily be positioned to allow you to use your dual displays, and can also swing wider to allow you to take advantage of the side-by-side Desktop mode, letting you have reference material side by side.  Or of course, you can just use the Zenbook Duo as a standard clamshell laptop.

The dual touch displays are a highlight of the Zenbook Duo, and ASUS have gone all out with their Lumina OLED panels. The 3K displays are crisp, bright, colourful and responsive, with the 120Hz refresh making for smooth scrolling across all apps. 

The displays are connected by a slightly offset hinge, which allows the keyboard to be stored between them. The slight offset works well in Dual-Screen mode, though does limit the hinge to 180° unlike some other dual-display laptops available. 

Above the top display is a FullHD resolution 3DNR (3D Noise Reduction) Infra-Red ASUS AiSense Camera with ambient light and colour sensor. 

The camera supports Windows Hello for fast login, and can take a decent photo in good light. It also works well on video calls, with the Built-in array microphone capturing your voice surprisingly well for a built-in option. 

Above the bottom display is a power button, as well as a charging and power indicator LEDs. Below the bottom display are the Pogo pins for the keyboard which line up perfectly with the pins on the base of the keyboard. . 

The keyboard deck is lightweight, yet surprisingly strong with minimal flex and can connect to the Zenbook Duo with either the POGO pins or Bluetooth. It sits flush between the screens on the lower display for storage, with strong magnets keeping it in place when carrying it, that also guide it home and align the POGO pins for charging. 

The keyboard is backlit and is comfortable to type on with 1.4 mm key travel and the large keys have a slight indentation guiding your fingertips to the centre of each key.. 

There’s a power switch and USB Type C port for charging, I typed all day before I saw any indication that the battery was low. You can simply put the keyboard back on the lower deck to charge, which takes around an hour, or you can plug a USB Type C charger into the side.

The ErgoSense touchpad is massive, and responsive. It spans almost half of the keyboard deck and despite its size and easy use, it doesn’t have issues with any phantom touches while typing. It supports multi-touch gestures and comes with a coating to ensure you won’t see fingerprint smudges. 

The Zenbook Duo includes a good port selection for such a compact unit. There’s dual USB Type-C Thunderbolt 4 ports and a USB Type-A port on the left, and a HDMI 2.1 port and combo audio jack on the right. The Thunderbolt 4 ports support Power Delivery and Display, giving you options for external monitors in addition to the brilliant internal OLED panels. 

On the wireless side, the Zenbook Duo includes Wi-Fi 6E(802.11ax) and Bluetooth 5.2 to help support connectivity to the wireless keyboard and all the other peripherals you could want.

Display and Audio

Let’s face it, the Dual 14” 3K (2880 x 1800) OLED touchscreen displays are the star of the Zenbook Duo show and they are just gorgeous. 

They support up to 500 nits peak brightness making them excellent to work on in a bright office, or even at the coffee shop when you’re outside. 

The colour reproduction, including those deep blacks we love from OLED displays, is excellent with 100% DCI-P3 support as well as VESA DisplayHDR 500 True Black certification. When you’re ready to kick back, there’s Dolby Vision support as well.

The 120Hz refresh is appreciated and with a 0.2ms response it’s sharp and smooth at all times. 

Dual Display Management

While it’s easy to drag and drop apps and windows around, the dual displays of course need a little management and there’s the ASUS ScreenXpert software for that. 

Here you can launch the floating control centre which includes access to an array of features including Brightness, Virtual Input, Keyboard Battery, Second Screen on/off, Sharing Mode, Lock Screen Rotation, Mic, All Apps and Settings.

There’s also quick access keys on the keyboard including a task swap function key (F8) for switching contents on upper & lower panel, and a key to disable the second display for when you need to eke out every second of battery life.

There’s also some gestures included to help. You can summon the virtual keyboard with a six-finger tap or a touchpad with a three finger tap. You can also swipe down with six fingers to access a heap of handy utilities including handwriting input, control panel, number key and quick key menu for common commands.

ASUS Pen 2.0

With such great touch enabled displays the ability to take notes or draw with a pen is a great idea. The ASUS Pen 2.0 comes in the box offering 4096 levels of pressure sensitivity and Four interchangeable pen tips in 2H, H, HB and B.

The pen works great, easily charged from the hidden USB-C port which ASUS says can charge the pen for up to 140 hours of use in just 30 minutes. 

There’s two side buttons which act as a mouse click or erase in apps. There’s also a button on the end for enabling Bluetooth.

The pen supports the Microsoft Pen Protocol (MPP) 2.0  and you can use the Handwriting panel with the software translating it and pasting it into which ever app you’re using. It works well in Word, Google Docs and Office 365 in Chrome, and of course in MSPaint.

It’s really well designed, and balances nicely in the hand so you can use it for a fair stretch without it becoming too heavy. While it can’t improve my handwriting, the software can and it works quite well to translate it. 

Audio

On the audio front you’ll find a Harman Kardon-certified Dolby Atmos sound system with 2 built-in speakers. The speakers are located on the sides and sound fairly good with decent midrange, though it does lack a bit of bass. 

There is the option to tune for spatial audio through the Dolby Access app.

Performance

The Intel Core Ultra 9 Processor 185H and 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM makes for a fast combo, and the 1TB Gen 4 M.2 SSD works quickly, including fast data transfers through the Thunderbolt 4 ports. 

The startup times are fast, with the desktop appearing in about 20 seconds from cold start thanks to the Windows Hello login. Loading apps like PhotoShopt or Premiere quickly, and were both good for light editing. Chrome was even running well despite it trying to eat as much RAM as possible. 

While performance is great running apps, browsers, watching movies and the like, the Zenbook Duo, or more precisely, the Intel ARC GPU, has issues with gaming. Games like the new sensation Palworld ran around 22fps through the Xbox app – bonus 3-month GamePass Ultimate trial included – and a laggy 14fps for games like Sons of the Forest. 

Through all this, the Zenbook Duo remains very cool, with the ASUS cooling system, which includes a Graphene sheet, 2 Heat pipes and dual fans and Heat spreader, keeps the system cool. I rarely heard any fan noise, and that was only because I was listening for it.

As usual I ran the Zenbook Duo through 3DMark and here’s how it went.


Battery and Charging

The Zenook Duo includes a 75WHr, 4S1P, 4-cell Li-ion Battery and includes a 65W USB Type-C charger in the box. 

Battery life on the Zenbook Duo was great, with a solid nine hours of battery life using a single display doing a variety of work in Office 365/Google Drive, as well as web surfing and catching up on my YouTube feed – a lot easier with a second display!

There was a small difference in battery life when using two displays exclusively, with around seven and a half to eight hours of use, so I was happily able to get through a full day of work. 

The 65W USB Type C charger will get you back to full charge in around two hours, though you can get around 50% charge in about 35-40 minutes. 

Software

Pre-loaded with Windows 11 Home, the Zenbook Duo also includes an array of optional software including an Office 365 trial and all the Microsoft apps you could want. 

You also get a bevy of apps from ASUS including the MyASUS app, their support app. In the MyASUS app you can see the status of your laptop, as well as running diagnostics, get updates and even take advantage of deals.

There’s also the ScreenXpert app pre-installed. As above it’s very handy for controlling your displays, as well as GlideX for adding in multi-display control including your mobile. 

As far as software goes you get a fairly light array of apps installed, and the Windows experience using dual displays, including the surprisingly good on-screen keyboard, is good. 

Should you buy it? 

The gorgeous displays and fast, high quality internal components of the Zenbook Duo, combined with the well engineered keyboard deck and kickstand make for a very compelling argument for anyone wanting to get things done on the go. 

The new Intel Core Ultra 9 and 32GB of DDR5 RAM offer a good platform for resource hungry apps for creators, as well as for anyone just wanting to get things done on dual displays. 

There’s things that can be improved in the future including improved audio, and of course if ASUS ever wanted to put an AMD or NVIDIA GPU into this it would be a killer. As it stands however the ASUS Zenbook Duo is a win for mobile productivity, and is well worth becoming your next road companion. 


If you want to check it out, you can head over to the ASUS e-Shop or JB Hifi.