ASUS ZenBook Flip S Review - Ultra Premium Hybrid Ultrabook With Latest Intel’s 11th Gen Processors
The latest iteration of the Asus ZenBook Flip S is the first laptop we’ve seen with one of Intel’s new Tiger Lake processors – but the 11th Gen silicon isn’t the only thing to notice on this hybrid. It’s got a superb 4K screen, a keen sense of design, and several future-proofed features.
Design
The ZenBook is easily stylish enough to turn heads. The premium body deftly combines dark aluminum alloy with copper-colored accents, and the letters on the keyboard are finished in a matching shade. Build quality is supreme: the ZenBook’s screen is one of the sturdiest we’ve used on a small laptop. At 1.2kg and is 14mm of thickness It’s not exactly chunky, either. The impressive build quality is bolstered by smooth movement; the 360-degree hinges feel robust and the ZenBook is easy to switch between laptop, tablet and tent positions.
Keyboard and trackpad
The keyboard has wide buttons with 1.4mm of travel, if a little short, and the copper text is augmented by a white backlight. It’s quiet, consistent, and comfortable, with impressive speed and a great balance between crispness and softness. The trackpad is incredibly wide, and its surface is precise and smooth. Its in-built buttons are fast, and it has an extra trick up its sleeve: tapping the top-right corner of the pad superimposes a virtual number pad over the top of the glass.
Display
The ZenBook is kitted out with a gorgeous 13.3in 4K OLED touchscreen with a matte finish. When it comes to screen technology, that’s top-notch. With a fantastic density level of 331ppi, the panel is incredibly sharp. The OLED technology delivers perfect contrast and the peak brightness of 502cd/m2 delivers huge punch and impact. With 100% of the sRGB gamut, 95.8% of the Adobe RGB space, and 98.4% of the DCI-P3 color space the uniformity is superb. Using the pressure-sensitive Stylus supplied in the box by Asus, artists, and creators can easily using the ZenBook in tablet mode to sketch.
Performance
The Core i7-1165G7 is one of Intel’s newer Tiger Lake processors. This updated architecture brings plenty to the table – at least on paper – when compared to Ice Lake CPUs. The move to a better 10nm manufacturing process promises faster clock speeds, and better-integrated graphics cores, support for LPDDR4x memory and PCIe 4.0, and native support for WiFi 6 and Thunderbolt 4.
The i7-1165G7 has four Hyper-Threaded cores and can run anywhere between 1.2GHz and 2.8GHz, and it’s got a solid peak Turbo speed of 4.7GHz. The improved versatility can be seen clearly in the TDP, which can vary from 12W to 28W. It easily handled web-browsing, Office applications, and mainstream photo-editing without any problems. The CPU’s great single-threaded performance has an impact, and the superb SSD read and write speeds of 3,200MB/sec and 2,836MB/sec keep the machine responsive.
Ports and Features
On the left-hand side along with an HDMI port, there are two USB-C ports that support Thunderbolt 4, which means a huge maximum bandwidth of 40Gb/sec. There is no Thunderbolt 4 devices that can make use of that speed right now, but it’s a welcome, future-proofed addition. On the right-hand side is a full-size USB 3.2 Gen 1. The 720p webcam supports Windows Hello, and on the inside, the ZenBook has TPM 2.0. The ZenBook doesn’t have a headphone jack, though a USB-C-to-audio adapter is included in the box alongside a USB-to-Ethernet adapter and a stylus.
Verdict
The ZenBook’s 4K OLED screen has great quality, the design is stylish and sturdy, and it serves up good battery life and reasonable performance. The keyboard and trackpad impress, too. That said, the ZenBook is not without fault. The CPU doesn’t deliver any significant advantage over last-gen chips, But if u ultimately just want a top-quality, highly portable hybrid laptop that can do multiple things while looking pretty all the time — the ZenBook Flip S is appealing in its own right. The ZenBook Flip S with 4K Touchscreen and Core i7-1165G7 is priced at Rs. 1,49,990
