Asus Zenbook S 13 Flip OLED Review

The premium shelf is always the most competitive for a product, and that's most true for high-end 2-in-1 laptops. The Asus Zenbook S 13 Flip OLED (about $1,490) shows how tight the competition has become, with a convertible laptop/tablet design, a weight low enough to qualify as an ultraportable, and a capable Intel 12th Generation Core i7 processor. That's before even mentioning the OLED display, the included pen, the touchpad that doubles as a number pad, and the super-sturdy magnesium-alloy construction. Despite this long list of pros—including nearly 14 hours of battery life—the Asus Zenbook S 13 Flip OLED still doesn't manage to be the fastest, the longest lasting, or the best value, so it falls short of an Editors' Choice award. Don't let that stop you from considering this laptop, however, especially if peak display quality is a particular concern of yours.

The Design: Magnesium-Alloy Magic

The Zenbook Flip combines a slim, ultralight design with a convertible hinge that opens up traditionally and continues to fold back around for a tablet orientation, thus planting itself in both the ultraportable laptop and 2-in-1 categories. The lightweight design uses a magnesium-aluminum alloy shell that is rigid and durable, despite the featherweight 2.43 pounds it will add to your laptop bag.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Asus presents the chassis in two colors: Ponder Blue (like our review unit) or Refined White. What you won't see on the chassis, but that's still there, is Asus' Antibacterial Guard, a special coating on the laptop's exterior that reportedly inhibits bacterial growth on the oft-handled surfaces.

Measuring just 0.59 by 11.67 by 8.26 inches, this Zenbook is thinner than many of our favorite ultraportables, such as the Lenovo Yoga 7i 14 Gen 7 (2022) and the HP Spectre x360 13.5 (2022), but it cuts weight without sacrificing ports or features.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

There's more to portability than just size and weight, of course; factors such as long battery life and fast-charge technology matter, too. (In the case of the Zenbook, it can charge to up to 60% capacity in under an hour.) Between those two factors, it should be rare that your Zenbook S 13 Flip OLED gets low on battery.

The Display: An Impressive OLED, With Touch and Pen Support

Easily one of the most impressive aspects of the Zenbook is the OLED display, a 13.3-inch OLED panel that comes with all the trimmings. These include 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut (with Pantone-validated color), as well as support for Dolby Vision HDR, and a Corning Gorilla Glass coat to prevent scratches. Joining the display is a Dolby Atmos stereo sound system, which produces decent sound quality and volume.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Watching episodes of Andor on the Zenbook's OLED display, I was impressed by how the inky blacks make details pop and the brightness of the display left colors looking realistic and vibrant. The HDR support really stood out, as well, with everything from atmospheric lighting to blaster bolts and switches on spaceship control panels getting an extra boost of brightness. The sound was also quite satisfying, though the spatial aspects of the Dolby Atmos format are largely wasted on laptop speakers.

Asus' OLED panel presents a 2,880-by-1,800-pixel resolution, along with touch and pen support, complete with an included Asus Pen 2.0, which delivers 4,096 pressure levels for comfortable, intuitive writing and drawing, along with four interchangeable tips.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Using the pen with the laptop turns out to be comfortable, and the use of a narrow-bezel design makes it feel less like drawing on a screen, and more like sketching on paper. The display's 16:10 aspect ratio is also quite roomy to use in tablet mode, offering more width in portrait orientation than a traditional 16:9 display, but not as much as the 3:2 aspect ratio in use on many other current 2-in-1 laptops.

This pen also has two unwelcome quirks. The first is the lack of any onboard storage for the pen. There's no storage slot or barrel in the chassis, nor magnets inside the frame or the pen to attach it. The other issue is charging. While the pen doesn't force you to swap out tiny batteries, it does need to be charged, and the method is less than ideal. The back end of the pen slides out to reveal a USB-C connector, Apple Pencil style, and you can plug that into either your laptop or another USB-C port to juice it up. The good news is that it lasts more than 140 hours on a full charge. The bad news is that you'll then need to remember where you put the included 6-inch charging cable.

Finer Features: Keyboard, Touchpad, Ports

Asus' full-size Zenbook keyboard is quite effective, with decent depth to each keystroke and a slightly dished surface on each keycap. The keyboard has an adjustable backlight, as well, making it easy to type even in dark environments.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Stretching almost the entire distance from the spacebar to the lip of the laptop chassis, the accompanying touchpad is considerably wide, measuring a full 5 inches across. It also has a trick up its sleeve: Press the top right corner of the touchpad, and it lights up to become a numeric pad, a feature we've seen before on the 2021 Asus Zenbook 13 and many other Asus models. It's not as dazzling as the second-screen touchpad offered on some other Zenbook models (like the Asus Zenbook 13 from 2020), but it's still a useful option.

Asus has also outfitted the Zenbook S 13 Flip with a 1080p webcam, complete with IR function for secure logins with Windows Hello facial recognition. If you want something similar without the facial recognition, the laptop also has a fingerprint sensor integrated into the power button, making security seamless.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Surprisingly, on a laptop this slim, you'll actually find a decent selection of ports. On the right sits a microSD card slot and two USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports, along with an audio headset jack. 

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

On the left, you'll find a third USB-C port—notably not Thunderbolt 4—that can also handle charging the laptop or driving an external monitor over DisplayPort. The laptop also has Wi-Fi 6E for best-in-class wireless connectivity, and Bluetooth 5.2 for any wireless audio or peripherals. 

Testing the Asus Zenbook S 13 Flip OLED: Convertibles in Tough Competition

Our Asus Zenbook S 13 Flip OLED (UP5302) review unit came outfitted with an Intel Core i7-1260P processor, a 12-core CPU with four Performance cores and eight Efficient cores, which can scale up to a 4.7GHz clock speed. This is paired with integrated Intel Iris Xe Graphics, 16GB of memory, and a 1TB solid-state drive for storage.

While our specific configuration isn't currently being sold in the U.S., a very similar one (model UP5302ZA-DH74T) is selling for $1,486.27 on Amazon at the time of writing. The only difference between this model and the one we tested is a smaller 512GB SSD for storage.

In terms of price, that puts it right in line with other top 2-in-1 models, like the Lenovo Yoga 7i 14 Gen 7 (2022; starts at $879.99; $949.99 as tested), the OLED-equipped 2022 HP Spectre x360 13.5 (starts at $1,149.99; $1,749.99 as tested) and the 2022 Acer Spin 5 ($1,379.99), though it's a bit more expensive than the Dell Inspiron 14 7415 2-in-1 (starts at $799.99; $999.99 as tested). And, because it's also an ultraportable, we also compared it with the Dell XPS 13 Plus (starts at $1,299; $1,949 as tested), one of our favorite OLED-equipped laptops.

Productivity Tests 

UL's PCMark 10, our main performance benchmark, simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. (See more about how we test laptops.) 

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our final productivity test is workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop(Opens in a new window), which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

Armed with that Intel Core i7-1260P processor, the Zenbook Flip is well-equipped for all of your day-to-day needs, whether at home or in the office. However, there's a surprising amount of variance between it and other similarly equipped systems, like the Acer Spin 5, which posts significantly better scores in Cinebench, Geekbench, and Photoshop, despite using the same Core i7 CPU. The difference there may be down to the larger dimensions of the Acer Spin 5, which is nearly a tenth of an inch thicker, and therefore likely has more room for air cooling and thus a higher performance ceiling.

While this laptop's overall performance isn't at the front of the pack in every test, the Zenbook Flip still holds its own with competitive overall performance. It easily clears the 4,000-point threshold in PCMark 10, making it excellent for daily use in programs like Microsoft Word and Excel, not to mention web browsing and media streaming.

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics), and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

Additionally, the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5 stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

Like almost every comparable ultraportable and 2-in-1, the Zenbook Flip's Intel Iris Xe Graphics are effective enough for almost everything but gaming and heavy media work. For that, you'll want something with a discrete GPU, and those won't be found in a slim ultraportable. But for general media tasks, ranging from streaming video to light photo and video editing, the Zenbook Flip OLED proves itself a peer to some of our favorite thin and light 2-in-1s.

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

Next, to test laptop displays, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the panel can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

When it comes to battery life and display quality, the Zenbook Flip is all about the OLED. Because OLED illuminates individual pixels instead of bright backlights behind an LCD panel, and can actually turn them off completely when pure black areas are desired, it can deliver longer battery life than IPS screens, like the Acer Spin 5 (2022). With that, the Zenbook lasts nearly 14 hours—more than an hour longer than the Acer. A couple of other OLED models edge farther ahead, but the fact is that the Asus Zenbook Flip should carry you through a full day of work or school with ease, even if you leave the charger at home.

Asus' OLED panel quality is also particularly premium. It delivers a full 100% of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamuts, and an almost-perfect 97% of the Adobe RGB gamut. The brightness cannot match the more powerful backlights you'll get on something like the Acer Spin 5, but with 337 nits at full brightness (and higher for HDR content), it matches the best OLED laptops you can buy.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Verdict: The Dilemma of a Premium Price

The Asus Zenbook S 13 Flip OLED is an excellent ultraportable, a better 2-in-1, and an impressive OLED laptop. The main problem with it? It's cursed by its lofty price, which pits it against other, equally impressive competitors. On its own, the Zenbook Flip OLED would hoover up awards based on its build quality and feature set alone, but when stacked against similar models, this slim little laptop doesn't shine quite so brightly.

If you want a fantastic 2-in-1, the Asus Zenbook S 13 Flip OLED would be a fine choice, with a lightweight but durable design, a long-lasting and fast-charging battery, and a display that not only looks appealing, but gives you a rivaling tablet experience, too. If you want better performance, though, there's the Acer Spin 5 (2022), which generally outperforms it, and the HP Spectre x360 13.5 (2022), which continues its reign as our Editors' Choice pick, thanks to speedy performance and even longer battery life.