ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED UX8402 Review Philippines: Creator’s Dream

ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED UX8402 Review Philippines: Creator’s Dream

Review verdict: The ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED UX8402 hits the right spot for any creator in the Philippines that want an all-in-one laptop for making content.

Pros

  • Beautiful dual OLED screens
  • Color-accurate displays
  • Great performance

Cons

  • Bad battery life
  • The keyboard feels cramped and hard to use

ASUS has kitted out its creator-oriented, dual-screen Zenbook Pro 14 Duo with a new OLED panel, and the result is nothing short of breathtaking. While the dual-screen formula isn’t as fresh as it was when ASUS introduced it a few years ago, the addition of an OLED main panel breathes new life into the form factor.

Design

ASUS has been constantly refining the dual-screen form factor ever since its introduction a few years ago, and this year’s Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED is probably the best iteration of it from a design standpoint. If you’re not familiar with it, the tl;dr; here is that the Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED has two displays in its compact chassis – a 14.5-inch primary display and a 12.7-inch secondary panel set right below it.

What’s nice about the Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED is that it’s not all that thicker than a regular notebook. With the lid closed the laptop is a hair under 20mm thick, which is a little beefy sure, but not overly so. It does weigh quite a bit more than a typical laptop, coming in at around 1.75 kilos.

The lid is treated to ASUS’ new design aesthetic, and the laptop fulls sturdy and robust, thanks to its all-metal construction. There are plenty of ports scattered around the chassis of the laptop, including 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports for display/power delivery, a single USB 3.2 Type-A port, an HDMI port, a microSD card reader, and a 3.5mm jack.

Displays

The whole allure of the Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED is the dual-screen setup that it has. There’s a large, 14.5-inch, 2.8K (2880×1800) resolution display at the top, complimented by a 12.7-inch, 2880×864 resolution display at the bottom. The top panel is decked out with all the goodies you’d expect from a top-tier display, which includes a 16:10 aspect ratio, 550nit HDR peak brightness, a claimed 100% DCI-P3 color gamut coverage, VESA CERTIFIED Display HDR True Black 500 certification, as well as PANTONE validation. Take note that the only OLED panel here is the main display – the bottom display still uses an IPS panel.

ASUS has upgraded the lid and opening mechanism of the second screen so that it raises around 12 degrees when you open the main display. While the second screen is still an IPS panel, its increased brightness and adjusted angle solved the nagging issue of the original LCD-powered Zenbook Pro Duos, mainly the tendency of the second panel to look washed out in places that had a lot of ambient lighting.

Both displays are touch-capable, and ASUS throws in a stylus that works on both the main screen and the secondary panel. The secondary screen, dubbed Screenpad Plus by ASUS, is a great tool for productivity freaks. During the Zenbook Pro 14 Duo’s time with me, it became home for my Slack and Discord chats and housed Spotify while I was working and researching. You can also use it to house controls for programs like Adobe Premier Pro, Adobe Photoshop, or similar to make it easier for you to edit.

As far as display quality goes, results with our Spyder5 Elite show that the laptop hits all of its promised metrics, and easily has one of the best, color-accurate displays OOB that we’ve tested from the company so far. You can check the full results of the test here.

Keyboard and trackpad

Because of the positioning of the second screen of the laptop, certain trade-offs had to be made. The most obvious one is the repositioning of the keys to the lower half of the chassis, as well as the relocation of the trackpad to the right. I’m not going to lie to you, the keyboard feels cramped and definitely will take some getting used to since your hands are going to be offset to the left because of the positioning of the keys.

Once you get used to this odd typing position though, the keys feel ok to type on.

The trackpad feels unnatural to use because of its positioning, though again once you get used to it it works generally OK. You probably might want to use a separate mouse with this thing if you get it because it’ll speed up your workflow tremendously.

Performance and benchmarks

The ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED comes in only one configuration for the Philippines, coming with an Intel Core i7-12700H processor, 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM, and 500GB of M.2 NVMe PCIe storage. The laptop also comes with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU to give it additional graphical grunt when creating content like videos, photos, and music.

Benchmark scores for the laptop give the Intel Core i7-12700H high marks and are right in line with what we’d expect from the 14-core processor.

Thermals were a bit interesting here, as the laptop recorded maximum, sustained temperatures of 93 degrees for the entire CPU package while we were running Cinebench. That’s certainly toasty, though take note that Cinebench isn’t completely representative of the temps that you can expect with this laptop.

As for battery life, the Zenbook Pro 14 DUO OLED doesn’t have particularly good legs, recording a measly 3 hours and 37 minutes in our punishing video-based battery rundown. Running two screens at once isn’t great for battery life, especially considering the other, power-hungry hardware inside the laptop.

Wrap-up and verdict

The ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 Duo UX8402 is a creator’s dream as we saw in our review of it in the Philippines, thanks to its powerful internals and beautiful OLED panels. If you’re the type that wants to fully embrace the dual-screen lifestyle, then it’s the laptop for you.

The only thing that’ll be stopping you is the price – but if you have the cash, then it’s the ultimate creator laptop for sure.

ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED UX8402 Review Philippines Price

ASUS will only be bringing one version of the Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED UX8402 in the Philippines, and it will be configured in the same review configuration that we used in our review. The Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED has a price of Php 159,995 in the Philippines.

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