As summer holidays fade into the rear-view mirror, treat yourself to much more than a new pencil case with our pick of the latest in productivity gear – whether you’re a roving coffee-shop worker, surfing between Teams calls at home in your pyjamas, or off to uni for the first time

ASUS ZENBOOK S 13 OLED

£1600 / go.stuff.tv/S13

The super-compact Zenbook range has been around for over a decade, but during that time it’s always kept pace with the latest advancements in laptop tech. This Windows 11 Pro model is no different, with a 2.8K OLED HDR NanoEdge display on top of a 13th-gen Intel brain and Xe graphics.

You also get speedy LPDDR5 memory, a 6500MB/s SSD and dual Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, along with support for both Dolby Vision and Atmos (though predictably the speakers aren’t the loudest). In short, you’d have to work hard to find something with a sharper edge – and performance just isn’t an issue.

And it’s so light – this is almost a sub-ultraportable. It’s around 200g lighter than Apple’s MacBook Air and the non-touchscreen version of Dell’s XPS 13, both of which are perennial favourites for us. So this model does up the ante in terms of out-and-out portability.

See the grey

Design-wise it doesn’t step too far out of the box, but the basalt grey finish is smart, with a mosaic-style design on the lid. Some sustainable materials have been used, including ocean plastics and eco-friendly ceramic aluminium.

As you rotate the screen open, the laptop elevates so the backlit keyboard is presented to you at a conveniently raised angle (the hinge can also rotate until the screen is flat for easy collaboration). Those keys feel great – keyboards on ultraportable laptops have improved so much over recent years, and this is one of the best. The trackpad is a little too easily clicked for our liking but you soon get used to that.

Life got bold

The OLED display may not be a touchscreen, but it is of a very high quality with a 0.2ms response time, superb brightness (550 nits) and support for the entire DCI-P3 colour gamut. Battery life is estimated around 14hrs, and it’s actually remarkable how little juice the 63Wh battery has to output, no doubt helped by having the latest Intel hardware alongside that frugal OLED. We got around 12hrs in tests, which is exceptional for a Windows laptop.

When you use this machine, it certainly feels like you’re getting the very best experience you possibly can – you really sense you can do just about anything, anywhere – and you know it’s not going to be a pain to haul around while you’re doing it.

KEY SPECS

● 13.3in 2880x1800 60Hz OLED

● Intel Core i7-1355U ● 16GB RAM ● 1TB SSD ● 63Wh

● 296x216x10.9mm, 1kg