The laptop Asus Taichi 21 comes with an innovation in this branch of the market and the result is not ignorable at all. This high-tech product also has a rather high price – around 1200 to 1300 dollars – and it presents a dual screen on a performing slim laptop. Although it doesn’t have a high degree of utility, considering that only one of the displays is touch-screen, the laptop presents rather a concept of the way in which a laptop-tablet hybrid might soon look like. The laptop is already available for sale to the general public and it seems to enjoy a decent amount of success.
Like any other touch-screen product from the recent period, Asus Taichi 21 comes with the Windows 8 operating system and it has two different versions of sizes: 11.6 and 13.3 inches, which create the difference of look and price. All the versions of this product have something in common, which is the double LED IPS display which presents a regular laptop display and a second display located on the opposed side of the first screen – on the laptop’s cover. The user can use the two displays separately or at the same time, the exterior screen acting like an extension of the regular screen or duplicating the existent content on the regular screen. This innovating option proves itself useful in the case of presentations or when the laptop is used by more than one person at the same time.
A great inconvenient might be the fact that only the exterior screen has the touch-screen technology. This small disappointment is, however, unjustified, because when one uses the device as a tablet, the laptop no longer needs the regular display and the keyboard doesn’t bring an ugly aspect, like it used to be the case for the 360 degrees flexibility laptops.
Under the chassis, Asus Taichi 21 has an Intel Core i7-3517 U processor which runs at a frequency of 1.9 GHz, a 4 GB RAM DDR3 memory at a 1.6 GHz frequency, a 256 GB storage space SSD and an Intel HD 4000 integrated video card. The display has a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels HD.
The ultra-portable laptop doesn’t have a spectacular look, but it has a spacious touchpad which also support multi-touch and a small and comfortable keyboard. It has two USB 3.0 ports, micro HDMI ad Micro VGA, an Ethernet Wi Fi network card and Bluetooth and it doesn’t have an optical drive.
The autonomy duration of the battery reaches up to four hours and 30 minutes when only one screen is used, while if both of them are being used, the autonomy duration of the battery drops to three hours.
In the tests, Asus Taichi 21 did quite well, obtaining good scores (415) regarding multimedia multitasking, thus overcoming its competition in reliability; also it’s not bad at all in the image processing tests in the Adobe Photoshop CS5 software, where the laptop got a score of 257 seconds.
The laptop with both displays turned on has an average consumption rate of 27 watts/hour according to the tests.
