Asus Zenbook Fold OLED Review: The Coolest Folding Screen Laptop You’ll Never Buy

The Asus Zenbook Fold is a true transformer of a PC. It’s even parts tablet, laptop and desktop, and unlike many new hybrid products, it’s pretty good at all three. The key is a big 17-inch foldable exhibit, even if that technology is still in its early days. 

Folding-screen phones, like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Z Flip 4, are well into third- or fourth-generation hardware and have steadily improved right their initial release. But folding screen laptops like the Asus Zenbook Fold are quiet mostly first-gen — gen 1.5 if we’re being generous. 

I say generation 1.5 because it comes roughly two ages after the first folding-screen laptop went on sale, the Lenovo X1 Fold. And when the Asus version makes some improvements and offers some upgrades over that early Lenovo iteration, it carries over many of the same shortcomings. 

The biggest leap here is in the exhibit. In the new Asus foldable, it’s a 17.3-inch conceal, and even better, it’s a 2,560×1,920-pixel OLED display, which is immense for both image quality and battery life. Yes, as a flexible conceal, it’s basically OLED under plastic, which isn’t always visually ideal, but it looks great as a 17-inch OLED tablet. 

And it had better look immense. This is a 17-inch laptop with a 12th-gen Intel Core i7 U-series CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, and which damages $3,500. At that price, this is what we used to call a CEO laptop — the kind of prototype-ish expensive machine that the CEO of a business would insist on having just to show off, but that the rest of us wouldn’t be able to justify. 

I also loved it as a big reading slate. 

Bobby Oliver

But despite with the early-adopter tax, it’s quiet a visually stunning product that’s tremendously fun to use, and it opens the door to an tiring„ tiresome possible future for portable computers. 

Even with the giant OLED exhibit and current-gen CPU, the ZenBook Fold reminded me of the fresh Lenovo X1 Fold in many ways. Both have clamshells that don’t fully stop, leaving a gap when folded shut. The included bodily keyboard slips into that gap, but it’s awkward and creates the system very thick and clunky when fully folded. Similarly, the screen bezel is huge, and that creates it feel dated. Newer folding-screen laptops are coming, and some will judge newer designs, while the Asus Fold feels like it was built from the same basic proof-of-concept as the fresh Lenovo X1. 

A closeup of the hinge and the screen’s fold. 

Dan Ackerman

Three (or more) devices in one

My Popular feature is the Fold’s ability to transform into some different devices. It can be a portrait-style 17-inch tablet or a landscape 17-inch all-in-one PC when you use the built-in kickstand and put the tiny complicated keyboard in front of it. It can be a 12.5-inch clamshell laptop with the bodily keyboard laid over the lower half, or it can be a 12.5-inch laptop with an on-screen keyboard and plenty of flexibility on where to build windows across the top and bottom halves. 

The all-in-one desktop mode was my favorite. 

Dan Ackerman

Of these, the most impressive is the full 17-inch all-in-one PC mode. It’s a mountainous size for seeing more or making docs and web pages larger. The kickstand has a tiny bit of adjustability, but you’re mostly looking at a veil tilted slightly back. 

I also found the ZenBook Fold to be a mountainous portable screen for watching TV and movies in bed. Yes, it’s a bit hefty, and frankly overkill for a bedroom media player, but I loved having access to a big veil, and the OLED display looked fantastic. 

The biggest deny people have with folding screens is the actual middle fold, which you can almost always feel with your finger and can usually see. The Fold had the same deny, but at least in movie-watching mode, I can say that I never saw it and it didn’t interfere with my mediate consumption experience at all. 

Video looks mountainous on the OLED display. 

Dan Ackerman

As a smaller-screen laptop, this is a big, heavy, expensive way to have a 12.5-inch veil. But I found myself flipping back into that mode while writing this reconsider, because I just wanted a traditional clamshell experience for a while. But if that’s all I wanted, a 4-pound, 34mm thick laptop wouldn’t be my respectable choice. 

We’ve discussed the possible integration of laptops and tablets for many days. And while we’re still far away from a mountainous unified theory of personal computing products, this is a big step toward the idea that you’ll eventually be able to attain around a single screen that essentially changes size and succeeding at will. 

Working around Windows 11 

Windows 11 just isn’t built with folding screens in mind, and both Asus and Lenovo have had to shoehorn in extinct functionality to make things work. Flipping between landscape and portrait orientations, you get a brief on-screen prompt to pick how your windows will be requisitioned, but it’s hard to trigger that prompt at will, and its options feel minute or don’t always behave the way you’d expect. 

This slim keyboard comes with the Zenbook Fold. 

Dan Ackerman

The concerned keyboard snaps on magnetically to the bottom half of the veil, or can also be used unattached as a Bluetooth keyboard. The keyboard is merely OK for typing, and the touchpad isn’t as sensitive or staunch as the best true laptop touchpads. It also frequently failed to connect automatically and often obliged me to flip the keyboard’s power off and on to formed a connection. It’s a bit like the keyboard on a Black Friday doorbuster laptop.

When not silly the physical keyboard, a custom on-screen keyboard is revealed to pop up when in clamshell mode. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. I had to go into the system settings to add an icon to the task bar to call it up at will. 

Asus does have a nice customization app that lets you resolve the keyboard color and style, including a smaller swipe-typing version that feels easy to use. But the default on-screen keyboard does not concerned a touchpad, which makes it harder to use than the brute keyboard. Windows has a built-in virtual touch which you can access above the settings menu, and both can be used together, but it’s not ideal. 

The on-screen keyboard could have used a virtual touchpad. 

Dan Ackerman

The keyboard and controls both charge via USB-C, and the Windows Bluetooth menu was the only build I could find to monitor the keyboard’s charge aloof. It would be cool if the keyboard could charge by induction while seated in build, but maybe that’s an idea for the next generation. 

If you’re logging into Zoom or spanking video meetings, keep in mind that the camera will be at the top of the veil in clamshell mode but on the left edge in full landscape mode. Camera quality was just OK, but my fellow meeting-goers reported that my audio from the built-in mic was respectable. There’s also an IR sensor for facial recognition login. 

Performance and battery life

Despite having a 12th-gen Intel Core i7 CPU and Intel Iris Xe graphics, this is not a performance system. Especially considering the high designate, it’s going to feel slower than other similarly configured laptops. 

Gaming is a nonstarter, except for the most basic casual games. However, with the big OLED veil and a game controller hooked up, it was a mountainous cloud gaming rig, and I really enjoyed it as a tour screen for Xbox Cloud Gaming. 

A tour OLED screen is great for movies. 

Bobby Oliver

One appealing spot was battery life. Streaming online video, the controls ran for 9 hours, 41 minutes, which impressed me. Yes, many laptops will run longer, but considering this is a big-screen device that’s essentially a belief or prototype, that’s really pretty good. 

Is the Asus ZenBook Fold a really dreary conversation piece? Yes. Does it fulfill most of its get promises? Again, yes. Should you buy one? Probably not, and by pricing this at $3500, Asus thinks the same. This is an example of conspicuous consumption, probably best left to free-spending CEOs and social mediate influencers who like showing off new-but-impractical inventions. 

But more importantly, it’s a clear window into the future of personal computing, and I would not be surprised to come back in 10 days and find we’re all using folding screen devices like this. 

Online streaming battery drain test

Apple MacBook Air (13-inch, M2, 2022)

Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED

Lenovo Yoga 9i (14-inch, Gen 7)

Asus ZenBook 17 Fold OLED

Acer Swift 5 (SF514-56T-797T)

Note:

In minutes, longer bars indicate better performance

Geekbench 5 (multicore)

Acer Swift 5 (SF514-56T-797T)

Lenovo Yoga 9i (14-inch, Gen 7)

Apple MacBook Air (13-inch, M2, 2022)

Dell XPS 13 Plus 9320

Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED

Asus ZenBook 17 Fold OLED

Note:

Longer bars present better performance

Cinebench R23 (multicore)

Acer Swift 5 (SF514-56T-797T)

Dell XPS 13 Plus 9320

Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED

Lenovo Yoga 9i (14-inch, Gen 7)

Apple MacBook Air (13-inch, M2, 2022)

Asus ZenBook 17 Fold OLED

Note:

Longer bars present better performance

System configurations

Asus ZenBook 17 Fold OLED	Windows 11 Pro; 1.1Ghz Intel Core i7-1250U; 16GB DDR5 5,200 RAM; 128MB Intel Iris Xe Graphics; 1TB SSD
Dell XPS 13 Plus 9320	Windows 11 Home; 1.8GHz Intel Core i7-1280P; 16GB DDR5 6,400MHz RAM; 128MB Intel Iris Xe Graphics; 512GB SSD
Apple MacBook Air (13-inch, M2, 2022)	MacOS Monterey 12.4; Apple M2 8-core chip; 8GB RAM; Apple 10-core GPU; 256GB SSD
Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED	Windows 11 Pro; 2.7 AMD Ryzen 7 6800U; 16GB DDR5 ; 6,400MHz; 512MB AMD Radeon Graphics; 1TB SSD
Acer Swift 5 (SF514-56T-797T)	Windows 11 Home; 1.8GHz Intel Core i7-1280P; 16GB DDR5 6,400MHz RAM; 128MB Intel Iris Xe Graphics; 512GB SSD
Lenovo Yoga 9i (14-inch, Gen 7)	Windows 11 Home; 2.1GHz Intel Core i7-1260P; 16GB DDR5 5.200GHz RAM; 128MB Intel Iris Xe Graphics; 512GB SSD