Asus launches Zenbook 17 OLED, an all-screen foldable tablet PC that turns into a laptop

Asus had teased the Zenbook 17 Fold OLED (UX9702) at CES at the beginning of 2022. Now the Taiwanese tech giant has launched it officially and will soon make it available to customers. Well, those who can afford it at least.

The Zenbook 17 Fold OLED UX9702 is a hybrid device based around a folding 17.3-inch 2560x1920px OLED display of 4:3 aspect ratio when fully unfolded. It also has a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio, a 100 per cent DCI-P3 colour gamut, 0.2 ms response time, 60 Hz refresh rate and 500 nits of brightness. When fully unfolded, it can stand on its own kickstand and work as a monitor - a nice combination for office work, combined with the Bluetooth keyboard. The Zenbook 17 Fold OLED can also be folded at 120 degrees and used with the Bluetooth keyboard, which allows users to still enjoy its 17.3-inch display in full. Users can also make the bottom half of the display act as a virtual keyboard.     Finally, the Zenbook 17 Fold OLED can be used as a conventional laptop with a magnetically-attachable physical keyboard and only half of its display at 12.5-inch and 1920x1280px. And if you just fancy a tablet, the Zenbook 17 Fold OLED can be used regularly as well, although, at 17.3-inches it is a bit bulky, especially to be held in one hand. The Zenbook 17 Fold OLED runs on Windows 11 and is powered by Intel’s i7-1250U processor with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM. This is Intel’s 12th-gen hybrid architecture with 2 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores. Graphics are taken care of by Intel’s Iris Xe processing unit. There’s a 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD - the latest and fastest storage around. There are two USB-C ports on the Zenbook 17 Fold OLED - both Thunderbolt 4 with support for both, display output and charging, which tops out at 65W. There’s also a 3.5mm audio jack. Inside, there’s a 75Whr 4-cell battery that’s good for up to 9 and a half hours of screen-on time. The Zenbook 17 Fold OLED weighs 1.5kg, which again, is huge for a tablet but very reasonable for a 17.3-inch device. As for the price and availability, the Asus Zenbook 17 Fold OLED will be available by the end of the year for $3,499 in the colour black.