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Asus’s Zenbook line-up could easily be a thing of envy. It shines with its OLED displays, is built to look minimally elegant and is often impressively light and thin. The new Asus Zenbook S 14 OLED is no different. Let’s dive into the details of what makes this ultra-sleek laptop stand out.
Design
Each year Asus upgrades the design of the Zenbook S OLED series and manages to make it even classier. This year they’ve built the chassis with ‘Ceraluminum’, a high-tech ceramic in two colours — Scandinavian White and Zumaia Gray. I’ve got the latter for review. It looks elegant and very ‘business luxe’ with the matte finish and glossy minimal etching on top. The Asus Zenbook S 14 OLED is also super light at 1.2 kilograms, making it easy to pop in my tote bag and zip around. It’s also impressively thin with its width being 1.1 cm.
Display
The device sports a 14-inch OLED display with a 16:10 aspect ratio and up to 500-nits peak brightness. In line with the legacy of Asus’ OLED laptops, this model boasts a bright, vivid and immersive display. Photos and movies really look enchanting on the OLED screen, and I never had to push to brightness much beyond the halfway mark to get bright, cheerful visuals. The iconic Blue Eye Samurai series truly came to life on this laptop. The laptop also packs in a Dolby Atmos-certified quad-speaker sound system tuned by Harman Kardon. The dialogues ring loud and clear even at mid-volume levels and the music too carries a fair amount of depth through these speakers.
In line with the legacy of Asus’ OLED laptops, this model boasts a bright, vivid and immersive display. | Photo Credit: Bijoy Ghosh
Productivity
The Asus Zenbook S 14 OLED packs in the new Copilot in Windows and a bunch of proprietary Asus AI applications. For those who might not be familiar with Copilot yet, the software helps you look up information on the internet as well as files and folders on devices that you may not be able to locate.
There are also live captions available now to help you understand content that may not come with subtitles.
I primarily used the laptop to write, read and edit. The first feature that stood out was the super-bright backlight on the keyboard. While those who work in dimly lit rooms might appreciate it, for me the backlight was distractingly bright even at the lowest setting, so I decided to turn it off throughout the review. Also, the backlight cycles through patterns by default during the setup process — which is fairly long — and I found this quite annoying.
The trackpad is large and comfortable. It has a soft matte texture, easy to glide fingers across. The tap is also soft, and the touchpad also supports smart gestures. I can tweak the display’s brightness by sliding a finger along the height of the trackpad on the right, for example. I could also customise three or four-finger multitouch gestures to access my favourite apps.
The keyboard is expansive and comfortable to type on. The keys offer just a little more resistance than the ones on the Apple MacBook Air that I use daily, and that “soft push” on the Asus took some getting used to.
Tech Specs
The Asus Zenbook S 14 OLED runs on the Intel Core Ultra 7 processor and has 32 GB RAM and 1 TB of storage. The laptop runs on Windows 11 Home OS and multitasks efficiently and with ease. While it’s not designed for gaming, it handles casual games online with ease.
The keyboard is expansive and comfortable to type on. The keys offer just a little more resistance than the ones on the Apple MacBook Air that I use daily, and that “soft push” on the Asus took some getting used to. | Photo Credit: Bijoy Ghosh
It also sports an AiSense Camera, equipped with an FHD IR camera that works well for face logins. It also adjusts for low light really well, making me look good and not grainy in meetings when I don’t have ample light around. There are also Windows Studio Effects that include enhanced eye contact, portrait light for better visuals and creative filters that include illustrated, animated and watercolour versions of yourself.
Ports & Battery
The compact laptop has a limited number of ports — two Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports, an HDMI port and an audio jack on the left. Only one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A is located on the right. The Zenbook S 14 packs in a 72 Wh battery, which goes on for a couple of working days on moderate usage involving mostly reading, writing and watching multimedia. The laptop supports USB-C Easy Charge and a 65 W fast-charge adapter is shipped along with the device.
Verdict
The Zenbook S 14 OLED definitely plays to Asus’ core strengths — a bright, vivid OLED display, super thin and light design, classy finish, decent acoustics and battery life.
The laptop is great if you want something super portable that can handle everyday work stuff with ease. It’s great for those who often need to access emails, read, type and watch stuff on the go! If you’re looking for something that can handle video editing, video rendering and multimedia-heavy tasks, then you might want to look elsewhere.
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