It’s a MacBook Pro and Dell XPS 15 rival and according to Trusted Reviews will cost under £1,900 for the Core i7 model and around £2,200 for Core i9. There’s also a ZenBook Pro 14 (UX480), which will arrive later than its bigger brother. Largely, the ZenBook Pro 15 is a standard laptop in terms of design and build. Everything is where you’d expect it to be so it’s really the ScreenPad that’s out of the ordinary. LCD display so you can do a lot more with it than pointing and clicking. It’s a sight to behold and this secondary glass covered display is 5.5in and Full HD so it’s basically like having a smartphone embedded into the chassis - like the Razer Project Linda actually does. Like a phone, it’s got its an interface and launcher so you can control what’s going on. We found it intuitive to use and although there was a bit of lag, the sample wasn’t running final software. Out-of-the-box there are quite a few things you can do with like use it as a calculator, calendar or numpad - and it can automatically switch between functions based on the software you’re using.
Furthermore, it can be a music player and also has Office support so you quickly access things like formatting tools. If you’re not using a mouse, this could speed things up nicely for certain tasks. It just might come down to individual usage as to whether it’s genuinely valuable every day. The ScreenPad also has a Screen Extender mode so you can use it put anything you like on it. Again, this sound great but needs proper testing before we can give it the all clear. Asus says there’s ScreenPad support for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and YouTube with more coming - hopefully developers get on board. Asus Sync is in development and will let users control their phone from the ScreenPad. Back to more regular items and the screen-body-ratio remains at 83 percent so the laptop has bezels that are a fair bit bigger when compared to Dell’s Infinity Edge. While the trackpad is interesting and innovative, the same isn’t true of the keyboard. The ZenBook Pro 15 and Pro 14 have a backlit chiclet keyboard with membrane switches so the experience feels less punchy and responsive compared to some rivals.
At 18.9mm and 1.88kg, the ZenBook Pro 15 isn’t challenging for the most portable 15in laptop award but it’s not bad for what you’re getting specs wise. So it’s not the best choice if you’re looking for a device to travel around with you all the time, it’s more towards a desktop replacement but throwing it in a rucksack is certainly not out of the question. The ZenBook Pro 15 is only available in Deep Dive Blue, which comes with stylish copper accent trim. You get the premium feel we’ve come to expect from a ZenBook with the striking aluminium case and its concentric circle finish (you can ignore the unfortunate dent on the sample we saw). As the Pro title suggests, the laptop it a bit of a powerhouse with a big hitting spec sheet including high-end processing and graphics. For starters, you can get up to an 8th-gen Intel Core i9 processor. The i9-8950HK to be precise which is a 2.9GHz hexa-core chip that can Turbo Boost up to 4.5GHz and has a 12MB cache.
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