The Review of Asus Zenbook Fold: A Revolutionary Gaming and Streaming Device

As I sat down with the Asus Zenbook Fold, a Windows 11 device designed to seamlessly transition from a laptop to a tablet, I was immediately struck by its unique design. While this is a Windows 11 device, it has some problems that other folding screen PCs or PC concept pieces have encountered, mainly due to Windows 11 not being built around this concept. For instance, when I took the keyboard off and tried to use the on-screen keyboard, I found that there were limited options for customization. However, I did appreciate the ability to choose the color and theme of the keyboard, which was a nice touch.

One of the standout features of the Asus Zenbook Fold is its versatility. When I had a big screen open, I could easily resize it and adjust the layout to suit my needs. The device even had a feature that would semi-automatically adjust the screens when I changed from laptop mode to tablet mode. However, I did find that there was some lag involved in getting certain features to appear, such as the menu bar.

Another nice touch was the keyboard's ability to attach magnetically to the side of the device. This allowed for a convenient and stable typing experience, even if it didn't charge the device itself. Instead, the Zenbook Fold had two USB ports, including one on the side and another on the keyboard. While this meant I needed two power cables to charge both the device and the keyboard at once, it was still a useful feature.

Unfortunately, using the physical keyboard did present some challenges. The Bluetooth connection was not always reliable, and I found myself needing to toggle the power switch to connect it. However, the keyboard itself was not bad, despite being a bit thin and lightweight for a laptop. When used as a media consumption device, the Zenbook Fold truly shone. With its massive 17-inch OLED display, watching TV shows or movies in bed became a whole new experience.

One potential drawback of folding screen devices is the physical fold itself. I could feel it when running my finger over the screen, and if I looked at it under certain lighting conditions, I could see the faint outline of the fold. However, during use, this didn't seem to be an issue for me. In fact, I found that the deep blacks and bright colors of the OLED display made the fold almost invisible.

While the Asus Zenbook Fold is not a gaming machine per se, it would make an excellent cloud gaming device. I was able to fire up Xbox Cloud Gaming and use a Bluetooth controller with ease. The result was a seamless and enjoyable gaming experience.

Finally, when considering purchasing the Asus Zenbook Fold, it's worth asking whether this is something you'll actually want to take home with you. While it may not be the most portable device, it does represent a significant step forward in the evolution of laptops and tablets. With its ability to seamlessly transition between modes, the Zenbook Fold feels like a glimpse into the future of computing.

As I concluded my time with the Asus Zenbook Fold, I couldn't help but feel that this was an important device for several reasons. Firstly, it represents a major step forward in the development of folding screen PCs and tablets. Secondly, it shows us a clear vision for where these devices are headed. And finally, it's just plain cool – something you could show off to friends or colleagues to spark conversations about the future of computing.

If you're interested in reading more about my experience with the Asus Zenbook Fold, including all the performance charts and technical details, please check out the link below.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enall right want to see something really cool this is a gigantic 17-inch oled display and guess what it folds that's right it's kind of like a folding screen phone except it's gigantic computer now how would you use this well first you've got this gigantic tablet you know much bigger than an ipad or anything like that the most practical thing i would do is i would flip it around like this horizontally kick out the little kickstand and then take this little keyboard and put it in front of it now i've got a 17 inch basically an all-in-one desktop computer then i could take it and fold it just like this put the keyboard on it right there and then i've got a 12.5 inch traditional clamshell laptop with a physical keyboard now if you don't want to take the physical keyboard with you you can pop that off and of course just use an on-screen keyboard and then you basically got a two screen clamshell laptop you can put whatever you want down here are there windows there's on-screen keyboard you can put windows up here rearrange them and you've got the best of both worlds a really big really powerful really good looking tablet because it's an oled screen also a clamshell laptop and also a little all-in-one computer so that is the asus zenbook fold and even though it looks very cool it is kind of like what i used to call a ceo laptop or an executive laptop because it's so ridiculously expensive that like the ceo of the company would get one to show off but regular folks like us could never actually afford it because it's 3500 which frankly is a lot to spend on something that just has a regular 12th generation core i7 cpus 16 gigs of ram and a 1 terabyte hard drive now the thing about folding screen laptops is unlike folding screen phones which are into their second and third generation and have generally gotten a lot of the problem solved and are almost good enough for regular mainstream folks to buy and use folding screen laptops still kind of stuck on gen 1 maybe gen 1.5 if i'm feeling generous so this guy looks and feels a lot like the last folding screen laptop he reviewed about two years ago and that was the lenovo x1 fold it was much smaller but the general design was the same it still had this really thick body this really wide bezel it had the keyboard that clipped on it had an on-screen keyboard and in the two years since then we haven't seen a ton of evolution in terms of the actual mechanics of these the real big step forward in this model is the fact that it's a really big 17 inch screen and that it's an oled screen so even though it's a plastic screen which is what you need because it folds because it's an oled screen it looks really great when you're watching movies or you're watching tv and you have it you know set up in bed or on a couch and you're just using it like a giant ipad style screen so let me show you how i've been using the asus zenbook fold i think it's the most impressive and frankly most useful when you open it up like this you get the kickstand out and you put it down here you put the other screen in front of it and you use it like a mini all-in-one computer there's not a ton of flexibility with the kickstand i can move it up a little bit and back a little bit but that's really about it but frankly i'm so used to working on a 13-inch laptop maybe a 15-inch laptop if i'm lucky having this big 17-inch screen in front of me especially that i can just pick up and reposition anywhere i want uh that's pretty cool and i've enjoyed using it like this even if the keyboard and touch pad is not the best i also found that while i was working on it i would occasionally take it and flip it like this and turn it into a traditional laptop i just wanted that clamshell experience i wanted to feel you know the keyboard right here the screen right here especially when i was doing a lot of writing i went back to this mode now this is a 12.5 inch screen laptop if you do it like this i would not use it primarily in this mode because frankly it's really kind of thick and chunky like this it weighs four pounds and if you're using a 12 or 13 inch laptop that's kind of crazy to carry around with you but having the flexibility to then pop it out into this big thing that's totally worthwhile it's really cool for having flexibility on the go now because this is a windows 11 device it has some of the problems that the other folding screen pcs or pc concept pieces i've seen have which is that windows 11 is not really built around this concept if i take the keyboard off and i try to use the on-screen keyboard you know if i open up a web browser and i call it the keyboard i like that there are a lot of options for the color and theme of the keyboard and i can call that up right here and i have to admit i kind of like that so there's a certain amount of window resizing that can happen semi-automatically when you mess around with it so if i had a big screen open like this and then i tried to change it into a laptop oh look at that i can choose how i want to arrange the screens and they'll pop into shape uh you have to kind of you know fold and unfold to get that little menu to show up now i have it just on the top and that's great if i want to put my keyboard on the bottom here's another nice touch actually if i put the keyboard on the bottom watch the toolbar down here it automatically jumps up here because it knows the keyboard is attached this actually attaches magnetically uh it's not too strong of a magnet but it's enough to keep it steady which i like unfortunately that doesn't actually charge it there's not like inductive charging when you put it on this actually has a usb port on the side this also has a usbc port on the side so if you wanted to charge the device and the keyboard at the same time you'd have to have two power cables going into it my other thing i ran into using the physical keyboard is that even though it's bluetooth it didn't connect all the time for me i always found i had to take the power switch and toggle it off and on in order to get it to connect it's not the world's greatest keyboard but for something you know this thin and portable you can't really expect too much that said for a 3500 or a laptop this kind of feels like the keyboard and touchpad on like a black friday doorbuster laptop this really shines as a media consumption device because it's a big 17-inch oled display and if you're sitting in bed with this or sitting on the couch it's going to be much cooler than like having an ipad on your lap it's a little bit of overkill but i frankly enjoyed catching up on tv shows in bed with this gigantic thing sitting on my lap now one problem that folding screen devices have is frankly there's always a fold right in the middle if you run your finger over it you can feel it and if you look at it under certain lighting conditions you can definitely see it i saw it but i found that when i was watching a movie like this it did not pop out to me so i'm gonna give it a pass on having the mid screen fold especially with the deep blacks and bright colors of the oled display i was able to look past the fact that there's a physical fold in the middle of the screen that you can feel and kind of see now one thing this is not is a gaming machine although that would be very cool and i couldn't really run you know any mainstream games on it that said i feel like this would be a really good cloud gaming machine so i was able to fire up xbox cloud gaming uh bluetooth a controller in and it was a really good experience as a cloud gaming screen another thing that impressed me about the fold it had really good battery life it ran for more than nine hours playing streaming video and since that's one of the primary things i would want to do with it that's a pretty good score now listen this is 3 500 are you gonna buy this no am i gonna buy this no is it kind of this conversation piece conversation starter kind of piece that maybe you know an executive or a ceo or an influencer would get just to kind of show off and say hey here's the future of computing and it's really cool definitely and more importantly than that it really shows us a window into where the future of computing is going where we're going with that with that coming together that grand unified theory of laptops and tablets and portable computers where we've talked for many years about how they're all going to become one well this is one of the best arguments for saying i can have a really cool tablet and then turn it into a very functional laptop this may not be the model you take home with you i i get that i think if you come back in five or ten years you're going to find a lot of people using folding screen pcs and if you want to read my full review of the asus zenbook fold and see all our performance charts you're gonna find the link right down belowall right want to see something really cool this is a gigantic 17-inch oled display and guess what it folds that's right it's kind of like a folding screen phone except it's gigantic computer now how would you use this well first you've got this gigantic tablet you know much bigger than an ipad or anything like that the most practical thing i would do is i would flip it around like this horizontally kick out the little kickstand and then take this little keyboard and put it in front of it now i've got a 17 inch basically an all-in-one desktop computer then i could take it and fold it just like this put the keyboard on it right there and then i've got a 12.5 inch traditional clamshell laptop with a physical keyboard now if you don't want to take the physical keyboard with you you can pop that off and of course just use an on-screen keyboard and then you basically got a two screen clamshell laptop you can put whatever you want down here are there windows there's on-screen keyboard you can put windows up here rearrange them and you've got the best of both worlds a really big really powerful really good looking tablet because it's an oled screen also a clamshell laptop and also a little all-in-one computer so that is the asus zenbook fold and even though it looks very cool it is kind of like what i used to call a ceo laptop or an executive laptop because it's so ridiculously expensive that like the ceo of the company would get one to show off but regular folks like us could never actually afford it because it's 3500 which frankly is a lot to spend on something that just has a regular 12th generation core i7 cpus 16 gigs of ram and a 1 terabyte hard drive now the thing about folding screen laptops is unlike folding screen phones which are into their second and third generation and have generally gotten a lot of the problem solved and are almost good enough for regular mainstream folks to buy and use folding screen laptops still kind of stuck on gen 1 maybe gen 1.5 if i'm feeling generous so this guy looks and feels a lot like the last folding screen laptop he reviewed about two years ago and that was the lenovo x1 fold it was much smaller but the general design was the same it still had this really thick body this really wide bezel it had the keyboard that clipped on it had an on-screen keyboard and in the two years since then we haven't seen a ton of evolution in terms of the actual mechanics of these the real big step forward in this model is the fact that it's a really big 17 inch screen and that it's an oled screen so even though it's a plastic screen which is what you need because it folds because it's an oled screen it looks really great when you're watching movies or you're watching tv and you have it you know set up in bed or on a couch and you're just using it like a giant ipad style screen so let me show you how i've been using the asus zenbook fold i think it's the most impressive and frankly most useful when you open it up like this you get the kickstand out and you put it down here you put the other screen in front of it and you use it like a mini all-in-one computer there's not a ton of flexibility with the kickstand i can move it up a little bit and back a little bit but that's really about it but frankly i'm so used to working on a 13-inch laptop maybe a 15-inch laptop if i'm lucky having this big 17-inch screen in front of me especially that i can just pick up and reposition anywhere i want uh that's pretty cool and i've enjoyed using it like this even if the keyboard and touch pad is not the best i also found that while i was working on it i would occasionally take it and flip it like this and turn it into a traditional laptop i just wanted that clamshell experience i wanted to feel you know the keyboard right here the screen right here especially when i was doing a lot of writing i went back to this mode now this is a 12.5 inch screen laptop if you do it like this i would not use it primarily in this mode because frankly it's really kind of thick and chunky like this it weighs four pounds and if you're using a 12 or 13 inch laptop that's kind of crazy to carry around with you but having the flexibility to then pop it out into this big thing that's totally worthwhile it's really cool for having flexibility on the go now because this is a windows 11 device it has some of the problems that the other folding screen pcs or pc concept pieces i've seen have which is that windows 11 is not really built around this concept if i take the keyboard off and i try to use the on-screen keyboard you know if i open up a web browser and i call it the keyboard i like that there are a lot of options for the color and theme of the keyboard and i can call that up right here and i have to admit i kind of like that so there's a certain amount of window resizing that can happen semi-automatically when you mess around with it so if i had a big screen open like this and then i tried to change it into a laptop oh look at that i can choose how i want to arrange the screens and they'll pop into shape uh you have to kind of you know fold and unfold to get that little menu to show up now i have it just on the top and that's great if i want to put my keyboard on the bottom here's another nice touch actually if i put the keyboard on the bottom watch the toolbar down here it automatically jumps up here because it knows the keyboard is attached this actually attaches magnetically uh it's not too strong of a magnet but it's enough to keep it steady which i like unfortunately that doesn't actually charge it there's not like inductive charging when you put it on this actually has a usb port on the side this also has a usbc port on the side so if you wanted to charge the device and the keyboard at the same time you'd have to have two power cables going into it my other thing i ran into using the physical keyboard is that even though it's bluetooth it didn't connect all the time for me i always found i had to take the power switch and toggle it off and on in order to get it to connect it's not the world's greatest keyboard but for something you know this thin and portable you can't really expect too much that said for a 3500 or a laptop this kind of feels like the keyboard and touchpad on like a black friday doorbuster laptop this really shines as a media consumption device because it's a big 17-inch oled display and if you're sitting in bed with this or sitting on the couch it's going to be much cooler than like having an ipad on your lap it's a little bit of overkill but i frankly enjoyed catching up on tv shows in bed with this gigantic thing sitting on my lap now one problem that folding screen devices have is frankly there's always a fold right in the middle if you run your finger over it you can feel it and if you look at it under certain lighting conditions you can definitely see it i saw it but i found that when i was watching a movie like this it did not pop out to me so i'm gonna give it a pass on having the mid screen fold especially with the deep blacks and bright colors of the oled display i was able to look past the fact that there's a physical fold in the middle of the screen that you can feel and kind of see now one thing this is not is a gaming machine although that would be very cool and i couldn't really run you know any mainstream games on it that said i feel like this would be a really good cloud gaming machine so i was able to fire up xbox cloud gaming uh bluetooth a controller in and it was a really good experience as a cloud gaming screen another thing that impressed me about the fold it had really good battery life it ran for more than nine hours playing streaming video and since that's one of the primary things i would want to do with it that's a pretty good score now listen this is 3 500 are you gonna buy this no am i gonna buy this no is it kind of this conversation piece conversation starter kind of piece that maybe you know an executive or a ceo or an influencer would get just to kind of show off and say hey here's the future of computing and it's really cool definitely and more importantly than that it really shows us a window into where the future of computing is going where we're going with that with that coming together that grand unified theory of laptops and tablets and portable computers where we've talked for many years about how they're all going to become one well this is one of the best arguments for saying i can have a really cool tablet and then turn it into a very functional laptop this may not be the model you take home with you i i get that i think if you come back in five or ten years you're going to find a lot of people using folding screen pcs and if you want to read my full review of the asus zenbook fold and see all our performance charts you're gonna find the link right down below\n"