ASUS Rolls Out Hot New Notebooks, Displays & ‘Blue Cave’ Wireless Router At Computex 2017

Welcome to Taipei, and this year’s Computex event. It’s been about six years since we last attended the show, but it’s always worth it. Our coverage kicks off with a look at a press event held by ASUS, where it’s showcasing a maelstrom of products across the entire tech spectrum.

There are laptops, notebooks, convertibles, phones, all-in-ones, ultrabooks, routers, displays, and of course, desktops. It’s all here and ASUS isn’t shy about what’s coming.

The ZenBook Flip S is being lauded as the thinnest convertible laptop created at just 10.9mm thin and 1.1kg in weight. Being a convertible, the screen can fold out completely and turn into a tablet, but it also has a lock at 135 degrees to work as a standard laptop. It features an Intel i7-7500U CPU and an impressive 1TB PCIe SSD. The display is 4K with multi-touch and support for an active stylus.

If you are after more of an ultrabook than a convertible, the ZenBook Pro will likely catch your attention, as ASUS has made it thinner and lighter, while still packing in some high-end gear (for an ultrabook). An Intel Core i7-7700HQ (quad-core) that’s paired up with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, the same 1TB PCIe SSD as the Flip, and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. The ZenBook Pro features an impressive 14 hour battery and a 15.6-inch 4K display, all while maintaining a relatively thin 18.9mm body that’s 1.8kg.

If you don’t need the discrete graphics of the Pro, the ZenBook 3 Deluxe could be what you are after. While only a 14-inch display and slightly lower-end CPU, it makes up with two Thunderbolt 3-enabled USB Type-C connectors, capable of driving two 4K external displays.

There are two new VivoBooks, with the Pro 15 featuring a 100% sRGB capable 15-inch 4K display, targeted at creative professionals on-the-go. To help power it is an i7-7700HQ and GTX 1050, but with a 2TB HDD to store assets, and a 512GB SSD for the OS and apps. The S15 goes with a lighter CPU, but oddly, includes an NVIDIA 940MX GPU (hardly modern).

While many of the products are fairly standard product refreshes, one caught our attention, mainly because we didn’t know what it was at first; the ASUS ‘Blue Cave’.

Try and guess what that is, just by looking at it. If your first thought was a wireless router… OK, no one guessed that probably, but whatever. The Blue Caves is an AC2600 dual-band Wi-Fi router with no external antennas that features an Intel wireless chipset (rather than something from Broadcom). Administration can be done over a smartphone rather than through a PC with a browser if you so desire, and the router has a wealth of security features, including Trend Micro’s Smart Home Network for IoT management. Oh, and the hole in the middle pulses blue.

If laptops are not your thing, but a desktop with monitor is ugly, there are all-in-one solutions available, too. ASUS showed off the Vivo and Zen AiO systems, both targeting the 24-inch display range. The Vivo V241 is effectively a non-portable laptop as it makes use of a much larger NanoEdge screen found in its mobile devices, with a fairly light-weight Intel i5 processor with NVIDIA GTX 930MX GPU.

The Zen AiO ZN242 is the much more powerful of the two that uses the same display, with an i7-7700HQ CPU, up to 32GB of RAM and a GTX 1050 GPU. There is additional support for a 512GB PCIe SSD, or outfitted with a standard HDD enhanced with an Intel Optane memory module (the Xpoint memory system designed to accelerate storage, you can read about it here).

The ZenFone AR was shown off again, with all the same information as we saw earlier this year at CES. It’s one of the first generation smartphones to support Google Daydream and Project Tango. It uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 with 8GB of RAM, but comes with a very high DPI screen and a three-camera system for world tracking (23MP main camera, plus motion-tracking camera and a depth sensing system). As a refresher, Daydream is effectively Google Cardboard 2.0, but instead of being an app, the VR system is built into the OS. Project Tango is the world-sense system that augments reality by recording the world through the TriCam system and then displaying it through Daydream for a hybrid AR/VR system. When the ZenFone AR will get launched is still unknown.

There are plenty more events going on, and this won’t be the only ASUS announcement, as there is a chance we’ll get to see some of the new motherboards that might be coming out with tie-ins to Intel and AMD launches – if there are any. Stay tuned.