Companies like Samsung have teased the concept of a 17-inch folding tablet at trade shows, but the Asus 17 Fold OLED tablet is the first of its size to hit retail shelves. The 17.3-inch OLED display boasts a 2.5K resolution, a touchscreen, and a nearly imperceptible hinge in the middle that allows for folding. When folded, it transforms into a pair of 3:2, 12.5-inch 1920x1280 displays. Each display configuration boasts a 0.2 ms response time and a 60 Hz refresh rate. Asus also says the 180-degree hinge has been tested to withstand over 30,000 open-and-close cycles, which sounds like a lot, but it depends on how much you like opening and closing things. This translates to eight years of use with ten hinge activations per day. The specs are appropriately beefy, too, with an Intel Evo i7 chipset, 16GB of RAM, 1TB of solid-state storage, four Harman Kardon speakers, and a battery that gets around 12 hours of life per charge. It runs Windows and ships with a Bluetooth version of the company’s ErgoSense keyboard and touchpad. So what’s the downside? It’s certainly not the weight. This thing weighs around three pounds on its own and nearly four pounds with the keyboard attached. No, it’s the price. This is an extraordinarily advanced piece of technology that costs $3,500.
