The Asus Zenbook 17 Fold OLED is there with its foldable screen, we took it in hand. Is this the future? We give you our first impressions.

In the idea, we all dream of it, right? A screen that folds in half. You can carry it like a tablet. You can wedge it and use it like a Surface Pro. You can fold it halfway and use it like a regular laptop. You can fold it slightly and hold it like a book. So everyone who sees you take it out of your bag will ask you: “ Wow, what is it? “. And, you can tell them Oh, it’s nothing. Just a folding PC. “. How to feel like a real early adopter.

In short, we had the chance to get our hands on the Asus Zenbook 17 Fold OLED. First of all, it’s not the first machine of its kind… the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold is already on the market. We were able to take it in hand at CES 2020. However, as impressive as possible, the Lenovo machine turned out to be quite bad. Asus is therefore moving forward with a seriously ambitious machine, but they are not the precursors. Which is necessarily positive to avoid experiencing the first missteps that Samsung experienced with the Galaxy Z Fold for example.

With foldable or collapsible devices, there is always a big question. The answer to this question is no: you cannot see the fold when the machine is fully unfolded, although it is visible when the device is turned off. The exception is when the Zenbook 17 Fold OLED is partially folded like a book, the lighting is a little uneven, you can potentially see the crease on the corners. Really, when the screen is completely unfolded, it is completely flat.

As a reminder, when it is unfolded, the ZenBook Fold uses an OLED screen with a diagonal of 17.3 inches (2.5K) in 4:3 format, compatible with Dolby Vision. When folded, it’s a 12.5-inch diagonal screen (Full HD) in 3:2 format. Additionally, this ZenBook uses a touchscreen keyboard, and Asus plans to include a full-size keyboard and trackpad. This is the Bluetooth keyboard, Asus ErgoSense, which is installed on the lower part of the screen or can even be used separately as a wireless keyboard.

At first glance, the visual experience is successful. This OLED panel is bright, accurate and the colors appear bright and rich. However, there is no treatment for reflections… Which complicates reading as soon as you are too close to a window or direct light. It’s a brilliant screen, very brilliant even. Forget outdoor use. In addition, the borders are thick. Asus tells us about solidity, but we are far from the current standards of ultrabooks and tablets.

In addition, we obviously have questions about the hinge, certainly the most critical part of this kind of folding machine. Will she last? Can it continue to work perfectly after several hundred openings and closings?

Asus explains to us that they generated ” over 30,000 open and close cycles to ensure maximum reliability and total peace of mind “. However, these tests are generally carried out in the laboratory in controlled environments. You have to beware of it. From our point of view, the hinge seemed solid to us, however the mechanism is not yet perfect. If you don’t put the external keyboard in the middle, like a sandwich, there is a gap at the bend. In addition, it makes the whole thick.

Forget thin ultrabooks, this Zenbook 17 Fold OLED is neither thin nor light. It weighs about 2 kilograms with the keyboard, it really feels in hand. That’s twice as much as a lightweight ultrabook. What is true is that this weight is surprisingly much lighter than any computer with a 17-inch diagonal screen. This one is also thick when folded with the keyboard between the two screens, like a sandwich.

Nevertheless, it is extremely pleasant to transform this PC into a huge tablet, a traditional PC or a book, depending on what you are doing. It’s intuitive, even if sometimes we get the wrong direction, Windows 11 seems to manage these transitions correctly. We can display the windows by zones, we move them, we organize them as we want, it’s childish.

And, it was not easy, far from it. Imagine that this PC not only needs to know if it’s in portrait or landscape mode (just like any regular tablet), but it also needs to detect if it’s folded, how it’s folded, and where the keyboard is, then resize its interface accordingly. And, everything works.

On the performance side, it is here that the shoe pinches. On this type of machine, the choice is oriented towards an ultra low power processor for obvious reasons: thickness of the chassis, heating and consumption. With the x86 architecture, only Intel offers a suitable CPU. This is the latest generation Intel Core i7-1250U or Core i7-1255U Alder Lake.

Here, Asus has chosen Intel Core i7-1250U whose consumption does not exceed 9 W, with eight efficient cores and two performance cores. Admittedly, it consumes little energy and it is probably easier to integrate into the chassis, but the performance is also moderate.

In addition, Asus has not managed to separate from an active cooling system, so we find a fan. Inevitably, apart from a few ARM solutions, no magic exists for small machines like the Asus Zenbook 17 Fold OLED. We would have liked an Apple M1 chip, which does not need an active cooling system like on MacBook Air M1 or iPad Air M1.

To accompany this CPU, there is 16 GB of DDR5 RAM and 1 TB of NVMe SSD storage. It is a high-end configuration to justify the high price of the machine, 4,000 euros as a reminder.

Regarding autonomy, it is announced from 8 to 9 hours with the full screen used. If you only use half the screen with the physical keyboard, Asus explained to me that battery life is only improved by about an hour. Finally, the OLED screen consumes relatively little. When you have a MacBook Air M1 that exceeds 15 hours of autonomy, let’s say that 9 hours is the bare minimum that you should expect from a laptop PC.

For this first grip, I started by being very enthusiastic, ” Wow, the screen is big, you can put it in this position, it’s frankly clever “, after 20 minutes of handling, ” meh, they compromised here and there, it’s heavy, the bezels are so thick… “.

We feel that Asus has designed a functional product, however they have made compromises everywhere. For example, the edges of the screen are thick (for reasons of solidity), the keyboard does not charge automatically when it is placed on the screen (it must be plugged into USB-C), it is not backlit either, the set is not protected against splashes of water and dust, there is no support for a stylus… and above all, it costs 4,000 euros for performance that is only presumed to be correct.

The Asus Zenbook 17 Fold OLED is a product that we want to recommend from a technological point of view, but which should not be purchased in this first iteration. The key word here is ” patience “. Because all that being said, we have to wait for the next generations.

Samsung’s first folding smartphones were riddled with issues. However, several generations later, the Galaxy Z Fold 4 is a very good (albeit overpriced) smartphone. The base of the Zenbook 17 Fold OLED is solid. However, Asus still has work to do to design a product that will replace any PC or tablet.

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