ASUS ZenBook 14 hands-on: The world's thinnest 2-in-1 laptop with discrete graphics

First up, this is the ASUS ZenBook Flip 14, what the company describes as the world's thinnest 2-in-1 laptop that sports a discrete graphics processor. It has a 360 degree flippable touch screen that supports the ASUS Pen active stylus, with relatively thin bezels.

With a Kaby Lake quad-core Intel i7 CPU, 16 GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce MX150 d-GPU, at just 13.9mm thick, the ASUS ZenBook Flip 14 is certainly quite impressive.

ASUS ZenBook Flip 14 Specs

With a 360 degree flippable hinge, the ZenBook can be used in tent mode for watching movies or browsing pictures, flat for drawing, and in a regular clamshell laptop style for word processing.

The ZenBook Flip 14 has an aluminium body with a 14-inch screen with a metallic, spun-metal finish, coming in both gold and gray variants. At 1.4kg, it's impressively light too. The ZenBook Flip 14 also comes with 12 hours of battery life with fast-charge technology, allowing you to hit 60% battery in 49 minutes of charge time.

The small bezels on the ZenBook give it a 80% screen-to-body ratio, and ASUS uses 100% sRGB color gamut and a 1000:1 contrast ratio to provide more "lifelike" colors. It also reduces blue light emissions by up to 30%, which the company says reduces eye strain. On the audio side of things, Harman Kardon certifies the ZenBook 14's SonicMaster audio system, that ASUS says reduces distortion.

For ports, the ZenBook Flip 14 has a full array of I/O features, including a USB Type-C port. There's a couple of USB 3.1 Type-A ports, a full HDMI port and a microSD card slot for maximum peripheral productivity.

Speaking of productivity, the ZenBook Flip 14 has 1.4mm key travel on a fully backlit keyboard with a glass-coated precision trackpad. The ZenBook Flip 14 also supports digital inking with ASUS' own stylus pen, which provides 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity (a significant climb down from the Surface Pro's 4096 levels). Windows Hello finger print logins are also supported, with power-on-authentication technology, allowing you to power up the device and sign in simultaneously.

You're not going to be able to do any heavy gaming on the ZenBook Flip 14's MX150 d-GPU, but it should be a boost over Intel's integrated solutions. We don't have pricing and availability just yet, but stay tuned for information as soon as we get it.