Customer Ratings & Reviews

The Asus PZ13 is marketed as a creators convertible laptop, but it lacks most of what you need for it to be viable for creating. The biggest issue that this tablet faces is performance. It ships with a Snapdragon X Plus CPU, but unlike other comparable products, it ships with an 8 core variant that was just announced. This makes the CPU in this 20% slower which isn't that big of a deal. Where it really struggles though is GPU performance. The Adreno X1-45 comes in significantly slower in 3d benchmarks compared to the GPU in the 10 core CPU. While I don't know yet the specifics of the 8 core and 10 core when it comes to GPUs, this one is far slower. What is also not helping this convertible is the 20w TDP limit. Other snapdragon products allow for higher power, and while others face a problem with thermals by letting it run free, this tablet doesn't get hot leading me to believe there is additional thermal headroom to be had. What also makes this thing come up short is the quality (or lack of) in the accessories. The attachable keyboard is thin and flimsy, connecting via magnets to the tablet. There is no additional ports on the keyboard, no additional battery, just a thin flimsy keyboard that squeaks when typing. The tablet comes with a magnetic back cover that snaps on pretty easily and stays in place well enough. It has a hard kickstand the comes out so you can use it in a pseudo laptop like configuration. The problem is that it doesn't work well for using on your lap, slight angles/leaning/moving cause the setup to become contorted and horrible to use compared to other laptops. This would have been much better served to have shipped with a more hard keyboard attachment with a solid hinge that was detachable to give you a solid laptop experience while also allowing it to be used as a tablet. In addition to that, while this is marketed as 'for creators', the Asus Pen that is advertised along with it doesn't actually come with the tablet. You'd think for the price they would include the pen, but no they ask an additional $100 for it. Probably for the best because the pen attachment on the case is a simple cheap plastic loop which I would trust holding a bic pen, let alone a $100 pen. Without the pen, you're stuck with the mediocre windows tablet experience where the interface isn't intuitive driving you mad with misclicks or struggling to figure out how to perform the action you need. This isn't necessarily an Asus problem, but they are selling a windows tablet, they should be doing what they can to mitigate the known issues (in this case, shipping it with the Asus pen). As for performance in creative apps, the new Snapdragon processors leave a lot to be desired. In Photoshop it performs about as well as other 20w CPUs that are out, but lag behind other more powerful CPUs. In photoshop the performance is about what I expected and is usable for light tasks. Whats not usable is just about any other Adobe applications. For video editing in Premiere Pro, the performance comes in drastically low, only competing with 10 year old CPUs. Its not entirely the CPUs fault, but instead Adobes for not porting over Premiere to ARM yet, which leads us to the next problem, app support. For creators, you most likely are going to be using Adobe apps, but outside of Photoshop and Premiere Pro, the rest aren't supported yet. Illustrator in Creative Cloud redirects you to a web app, there is no InDesign, no After Effects, etc. You're limited to just those two. Whats ironic about this is the free 3 month trial for Adobe Creative Cloud that comes with this is essentially just a 3 month trial of Photoshop. On the plus side, other companies are doing better at porting their software, Affinity has ported their 3 software suites to work with ARM already and they work very well on this. Still wouldn't attempt to do any heavy lifting with this, but for light work they perform just as well as other laptops. For video the best option I have found is Davinci Resolve which has also been ported to ARM. For all they've done though, you're still limited by the slow CPU/GPU found in the tablet and its not going to be a pleasant experience. There are positives to this tablet though. The screen is absolutely phenomenal. Quite possibly the best looking display I've seen on a device yet. The 1800p OLED screen packs a PPI north of 250 leading to an extremely sharp image. The blacks are extremely deep because of the OLED panel which leaves you with an essentially infinite contrast ratio. The colors are very vibrant, in fact in some videos I found them maybe to be a little over saturated but nothing that I feel detracted from the experience. The only drawback I have experienced with the display is the lack of an anti-reflective coating. This is a very glossy display which leads to high def reflections in bright environments. Additionally, one of the drawbacks of the OLED display is the blacks raise to become purple when you have direct light hitting the display, making the blacks worse than what you'd experience on an IPS display. Not really a big issue, but something to be on the lookout for. Finally, the sound on this tablet is really nice. The speaker setup on this is better than what you'd experience on most laptops. I found it to be very comparable to a Macbook in this regard which is nice. The sound seems a little artificially 'bassy' but thats a nice contrast to other laptops and tablets that come off very flat. The volume is also very respectible for something so small. All this said, for what they are asking for this device I feel like you should be getting a lot more. A more useful keyboard, a pen, and more performance. If this had the 10 core Snapdragon in it I wouldn't be so harsh, but this is the new 8 core that is aimed at budget devices, but here Asus is asking a premium price giving you the least amount possible.

Too heavy for a notepad; too clunky for a laptop, having all the weight all in the screen. I sent it back without ever even turning it on.

- First off if you have short legs you will never be able to use this on your lap. No matter how much I jammed the keyboard into my tummy I didnt have enough lap depth to prop up the screen. 2nd: the loop for the pen is so badly placed. If you have a pen in it, the pen is in the way of the port. 3rd. The way the keyboard attaches it adds a ton of depth to machine. It made it as deep as my old 14”, might as well get a 14”. 4th: When it is charging I couldnt find a light indicating it was getting power. I am the king of sloppily plugging stuff in, I need that affirmation light. Is it fast? Who knows. I didnt even make it through full set up before deciding “**** this. I am returning it”. I hated it so much.