Dual-screen notebooks are only getting bigger. Last year Asus put a 5.5-inch screen in the touchpad of its ZenBook Pro, while HP dropped a six-inch second screen on its Omen X 2S gaming laptop. And this week Microsoft announced the 2020 Surface Neo, with two 9-inch screens joined by a hinge.

In the here and now, Asus has released its own dual-screen laptop in the ZenBook Pro Duo, pairing a 15.6-inch 4K OLED primary touch display with a second screen that's half the height but just as wide and sharp. The $5000 machine is stunning to look at and, while the experience of using it isn't perfect, it's easy to see why this is the direction the industry is headed.

Despite weighing in at a hefty 2.5kg, the ZenBook Pro Duo is an elegant-looking laptop that packs some serious punch under the hood. With a 45W eight-core Intel i9-9980HK processor, 32GB RAM and Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 discrete graphics, this is a performance laptop in every sense of the word.

Compromises had to be made to accommodate the secondary display; the keyboard is shifted down with no place to rest your palms, the trackpad has been crammed into the right side, and you'll only get 3.5 hours of battery life on the go. It's clearly designed for the desk, where you can snap on the included wrist rest for a more comfortable typing position and plug into the mains for power. However you'll need quite a bit of desk space as the laptop and wrist rest together are about 33 centimetres deep.