The IFA 2022 opens its doors in Berlin and this year it is the manufacturer Asus who is headlining. The brand has just unveiled a particularly attractive foldable screen PC, the Zenbook 17 Fold OLED. Concretely, it is a vast foldable 17.3″ FOLED screen – which folds in two parts thanks to a specially designed hinge then delivering two 12.5″ displays.
Unfolded, the screen offers a 4:3 format with a maximum definition of 2560 x 1920 px. Optimized for gamers, the screen offers a latency of only 0.2 ms (60 Hz), all for a peak brightness of 500 nits, and, OLED requires, an exceptional contrast ratio of 1,000,000: 1. The color rendering is very faithful – the panel covers 100% of the DCI-P3 color space, the standard originally developed for cinema professionals.
Asus Zenbook 17 Fold OLED, one of the first foldable screen PCs on the market
© Asus
In all, this flexible screen delivers 1.07 billion colors, is also Pantone approved and certified VESA and HDR True Black 500. The finish is glossy, and it is a touch screen that you can use if necessary directly as a Tablet. In addition, the panel filters 70% of harmful blue light for the eyes and the whole is implemented so that the screen / device ratio is 87%.
An accessory, comprising a keyboard with physical keys and a trackpad can be placed on one of the screen halves or used as a remote keyboard/mouse combo when you need the whole 17.3″ display. The screen is surmounted by a video sensor with infrared function for Windows Hello facial recognition.
The technical sheet is rather there on this ultra-premium product, even if you should not count on a lot of scalability on the component side. The PC comes with an Intel Core i7-1250U processor – a chip capable of both driving autonomy to its limits and delivering a lot of computing power when needed.
The Asus Zenfold 17 syncretizes a balance between performance and autonomy
© Asus
This 12th generation processor launched in early 2022 is made up of 10 cores, including 8 low-power cores and 2 performance cores – for a total of 10 threads. The chip is able to modulate its frequency from 1.1 GHz to 4.70 GHz peak to closely match the needs of the user. This allows the chip to consume only 9W in base power, while rising to a maximum of 29W when activating “Turbo Power”.
Note that the chip supports a maximum of 64 GB of RAM, although the machine comes with a maximum of 16 GB of LPPDR5 RAM (soldered to the motherboard) and 1 TB of ultra-fast internal storage. The graphics part is provided by the new Intel Xe Iris GPU, which is rather decent for running games without compromising battery life too much. In any case with modest graphics settings (1080p @ 60 Hz).
The autonomy is precisely ensured by a 75 Watt-hour battery, which allows it to last between 9.5 hours (screen folded) and 8.5 hours (screen unfolded) which is rather decent for a computer designed around a x86 architecture. The computer has a 65W fast charging system via its two Thunderbolt 4 ports. The charger is included in the box.
The price of the Asus Zenfold 17 reserves it for the moment for early adopters
© Asus
In addition to its Thunderbolt ports, the device offers a 3.5 mm combo jack, WiFi 6E connectivity, and Bluetooth 5.2. The screen computer is also surrounded by four Dolby Atmos-certified Harman Kardon speakers. Of course, with all these qualities and such a technological leap, comes two questions: that of the durability of the product and its price.
According to the brand, the hinge and the screen have been tested to withstand more than 30,000 opening and closing cycles, which is far from the 200,000 cycles guaranteed by Samsung on the Galaxy Fold 4. Note, however, that the Smartphones are consulted much more frequently than computers, so this figure should in a majority of use cases be a non-issue.
Read also – Asus announces the very first laptop with a foldable OLED display
The tariff, on the other hand, reserves this device for the moment for informed users who favor innovation above all. At € 3,999, in fact, it is possible to access a much better technical sheet on a more conventional device. We note in passing that the precise date of availability of the Asus Zenfold 17 OLED in Europe has not yet been communicated. However, the brand promises the arrival of the product in France by the end of 2022.
