This year, Asus will be stepping into foldable screen laptop territory. The company is no stranger to experimenting with novel and exotic hardware concepts, and this time it no different. Among Asus’ many CES 2022 announcements is the introduction of the Zenbook 17 Fold OLED, a 17.3-inch clamshell with a foldable OLED screen that will become available later this year. Just like foldable phones, the whole idea of using a foldable display in a laptop is to give you more screen real estate to work with while keeping the overall footprint of the device small enough to maintain portability. The Zenbook 17 Fold is not small by any means, and when unfolded it’s essentially a giant tablet with a 17-inch 4:3 ratio screen sporting a resolution of 2,560 by 1,920 pixels.
When partially folded sideways, it can also be used as a laptop with a 12.3-inch 3:2 ratio display, either with the on-screen keyboard or the full-size ErgoSense Bluetooth keyboard add-on. Spec-wise, the Zenbook 17 Fold is equipped with an Intel 12th generation Core i7 U-series processor paired with 16 gigabytes of RAM and 1 TB of PCIe storage. Connectivity options include WiFi 6 and two Thunderbolt 4 ports. A 5-megapixel webcam is accompanied by an IR sensor that’s compatible with Windows Hello. All this is powered by a 75 Wh battery that Asus has managed to fit inside the 8.7 mm thick chassis. The whole unit weighs in at 3.75 pounds, which is lighter than a 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Accompanying the Zenbook 17 Fold are two other OLED laptops, the Zenbook 14X OLED Space Edition and the Zenbook 14 OLED. The Zenbook 14X comes with a 3.5-inch “companion display” on the lid, and both models are equipped with 16:10 2.8K OLED displays that support the full DCI-P3 color gamut and a 90 Hz refresh rate. The new Zenbooks will land sometime in Q2 2022, but the company has yet to announce pricing.
