It is becoming increasingly difficult to get excited about laptops that try to be different, because more often than not, they are expensive without any substantial additional value. It is often the hardware, or the Windows operating system, that remains inconsistent and erratic. Since HT first reviewed the dual-screen Asus ZenBook Duo in 2024, a lot of water has passed under the bridge. Have things evolved since then? That’s a ₹299,990 question, to which the answer is rather straightforward.
What was innovative and different hasn’t evolved to anything more than a force of habit for the brand. One new iteration every year, because it simply has to be done. The experience hasn’t evolved meaningfully, and neither has the product itself, apart from the generational uptick of specs. Of course, this time it’s Intel’s latest Panther Lake chips, which are indeed a leap ahead.
The fact that the Zenbook Duo (UX8407AA-SN183WS) sits comfortably neither as a laptop, a convertible, a tablet, nor a desktop is a remarkable consistency in achieving nothing at all. The closest I’d classify this as is a desktop replacement, and even then, you’d be better off with an actual desktop. This is too thick and heavy to work as a laptop that you may wish to carry around, or as a tablet. The saving grace is that this 100-watt Type-C power adapter doesn’t have a brick, which is still common with many laptops—Asus made this adapter design switch a while ago, and many others still haven’t shown the willingness to do so. Little things do matter.
For whatever the opinions about the form factor and indeed its utility, this is undoubtedly a well-made machine. Asus’ use of Ceraluminum gives this a rather desirable mix of rigid build, a nice shade of Moher Grey and a finish that doesn’t catch fingerprints easily (though dust shows up more often than not). The big visual difference, if you like to notice fine details, is Asus managing a significant reduction in the gap between the two screens — from 25.31mm to 7.66mm, because of the redesigned hinge.
Asus pitches four modes for this dual-screen machine. As a laptop, a desktop with the screens vertically aligned, a dual-screen mode where the removable keyboard becomes the third cog in the laptop proposition, and a sharing mode, which is essentially a tablet-like scenario. In my book, only the laptop mode works. The desktop mode with vertical display orientation significantly reduces each one’s usable width. Secondly, if you keep this in a typical laptop setup with two screens and a separate Bluetooth keyboard, you’ll need to do this at a desk. One that’s also hosting enough depth. And if you do enable the virtual keyboard on the second, lower placed screen, it’s basically a futile, unintuitive attempt to redesign the wheel.
The integrated kickstand enables these features, and Asus says it has undergone more than 40,000 open-and-close tests to check for durability.
The two aspects where I have no critical analysis are the Asus Lumina Pro OLED displays and the Intel Panther Lake chips. These screens are absolutely gorgeous to look at, and basically another chapter in a book of Asus’ brilliance with optimising OLED displays. I distinctly remember a time from a couple of years ago when Asus made a concerted push towards OLED screens as the common factor in most of the laptops they make, and its a journey that’s only been a success. Even in a room with the brightest afternoon sunlight streaming in, these OLED screens on the Zenbook Duo offer no brief for distractions from reflections or glare. And that’s before you get to the absolutely gorgeous colours, an optimisation which I’d say remains unmatched with Windows laptops (my preference is DCI-P3 across usage).
This specific variant of the Zenbook Duo is powered by an Intel Core Ultra 7 355 chip, with 32GB memory and 1TB storage. I have experienced the same machine with the Panther Lake Core Ultra X9 388H chip and had noted at the time that this generation of chips is a big step forward for Intel and the wider computing device space. The 2026 edition of the Zenbook Duo also benefits from this chip’s improvements in overall performance, thermals and frugality. Battery specifically: it is easy to get close to 13 hours of backup time with intermittent use of the second screen, close to 15 hours if you use just one screen, as you would on a typical laptop, and about 9 hours when both screens are mostly in sync.
Irrespective of a genuinely good generation of hardware, that is, Intel’s latest chips and the OLED screens in use, the Asus Zenbook Duo (UX8407AA) is absolutely not an easy recommendation. The case for flexibility with this form factor will still be rare for most users (and therefore it’ll be money not returning best value), it’s heavy and often impractical, it costs a lot of money, Windows is still wonky at best, and there is far too much preloaded software to make heads or tails of it without cursing. Even under regular use, perceptible heat emerges from the vents on either side of the base, and the underside is mostly uncomfortably warm to be truly usable when kept on a lap. Not sure how many people are actually the target audience for this attempt at flexibility (who all like to carry two screens around, raise your hands). Even then, this isn’t a master of any trade.
