Hands-On With This Massive 17-Inch Folding OLED Screen PC From Asus
Laptops
Speaker 1: All right. Wanna see something really cool. This is a gigantic 17 inch old led 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, uh, tablet, you know, much bigger than an iPad or anything like that. Uh, 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 [00:00:30] 17 inch, basically an all in one desktop computer. Uh, 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 wanna take the physical keyboard with you, you can pop that off.
Speaker 1: And of course just use an onscreen keyboard. And then you've basically got a two screen clamshell laptop. You can put whatever you want down here. Other windows [00:01:00] there's onscreen keyboard, you can put windows up here, rearrange 'em and you've got the best of both worlds. A really big, really powerful, really good looking tablet because it's an alled screen, also a clamshell laptop and also a little all in one computer. So that is the ACEs Zen book 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, [00:01:30] but regular folks like us could never actually afford it because it's $3,500, which frankly is a lot to spend on something that just has, uh, regular 12 generation Kari, seven CPUs, 16 gigs around a one terabyte hard drive.
Speaker 1: 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, uh, problem solved and are almost good enough for regular mainstream folks to buy and use folding [00:02:00] screen laptops still kind of stuck on gen one, maybe gen 1.5, if I'm feeling generous. So this guy looks and feels a lot like the last folding screen laptop I reviewed about two years ago, and that was the Lenovo X one fold. It was much smaller, but the general design was the same. It still had this really thick body, this really wide Bezo. It had the keyboard that clipped on it had an onscreen keyboard. Uh, and in the two years, since then, we haven't seen a ton of evolution [00:02:30] 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 OED screen.
Speaker 1: So even though it's a plastic screen, which is what you need, because it folds because it's an olded 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 lemme show you how I've been using the ACEs Zen book fold. I think it's the most impressive and frankly, most useful when you open it [00:03:00] 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. Uh, there's not a ton of flexibility, but the kickstand, I can move it up a little bit and back a little bit, but that's really about it. Uh, but frankly, I'm so used to working on a 13 inch laptop, maybe a 15 inch laptop.
Speaker 1: 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 [00:03:30] if the keyboard and touch pad is not the best. I also found that, uh, while I was working on it, I would occasionally take it and flip it like this and turn it into a traditional laptop. Uh, 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 in 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. [00:04:00] 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, uh, that's totally worthwhile is really cool for having flexibility on the go now, because this is a windows 11 device.
Speaker 1: 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 onscreen keyboard, you know, if I open up a web browser [00:04:30] and I call it the keyboard, I like that there are a lot of options for the, um, 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 wanna arrange the screens and they'll pop into shape.
Speaker 1: Uh, you have to kind of, you know, fold and unfold to get that little menu to [00:05:00] show up. Now I have it just on the top and that's great if I wanna 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 ally. 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. Uh, this also has a USBC port on the side. So if you wanted to charge the device [00:05:30] and the keyboard at the same time, you'd have to have two power cables going into it.
Speaker 1: 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 to 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 3,500 or a laptop, this kind of feels like the keyboard and touchpad on like a black Friday doorbuster laptop. This [00:06:00] really shines as the media consumption device because it's a big 17 inch O led display. And if you're sitting in bed with this or sitting on the couch, it's gonna 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, uh, sitting on my lap.
Speaker 1: Now, one problem that folding screen devices have is frankly, there's always a fold right in the middle, and if you're running your finger over it, you can feel it. And if you look at it, uh, under certain lighting conditions, you can definitely see it. Uh, I saw it, [00:06:30] but I found out when I was watching a movie like this, uh, 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 Ola display. Uh, 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.
Speaker 1: So I was able to fire up Xbox cloud gaming, uh, Bluetooth, a [00:07:00] 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, uh, 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 we're an influencer would get just to kind of show off [00:07:30] 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 gonna 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 [00:08:00] the model you take home with you. I, I get that. I think if you come back in five or 10 years, you're gonna find a lot of people using folding screen PCs. And if you wanna read my full review of the ACEs Zen book fold and see all our performance chart, you're gonna find the link right down below.
