Asus ProArt PZ13 review: A chic, long-lasting 2-in-1 that shines

Microsoft has opened the door for some fierce competition. The Surface Pro has long charged a considerable premium for the honor of giving you a tablet and laptop in one (and then charged a premium for the all-too-essential keyboard). And that’s where the Asus ProArt PZ13 swoops in. It not only comes offering a sharp OLED display, a regal tablet design, and a competitive $1,099 starting price, but it also includes the keyboard cover in that price, not to mention 1TB of storage.

This is a great start to compete with the base Surface Pro 11 configuration and also sees it undercut another 2-in-1 tablet we tested recently, the much pricier Dell Latitude 7350 Detachable. There’s a lot of promise for the Asus ProArt PZ13, but its choice of a lower-tier Snapdragon X Plus processor (on top of the choice to use a Snapdragon processor at all given some compatibility concerns) may hold it back from being the perfect tool for a lot of people. But as a 2-in-1 tablet, it’s highly compelling. 

Further reading: Best laptops 2024: Premium, budget, gaming, 2-in-1s, and more

Asus ProArt PZ13: Specs and features

• Model number: Asus ProArt PZ13 HT5306
• CPU: Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100
• Memory: 16GB LPDDR5X
• Graphics/GPU: Adreno Graphics
• Display: 13.3-inch 2880×1600 OLED
• Storage: 1TB PCIe Gen4 SSD
• Webcam: 1440p
• Connectivity: 2x USB-4, 1x SDcard reader
• Networking: WiFi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
• Biometrics: Windows Hello facial recognition
• Battery capacity: 70 watt-hours
• Dimensions: 11.5 x 7.9 x 0.71 inches (total); 11.5 x 7.9 x 0.35 inches (tablet only) 
• Weight: 3.34 pounds (total); 1.92 pounds (tablet alone)
• MSRP: $1,099 as-tested ($1,099 base)

Asus ProArt PZ13: Design and build quality

The Asus ProArt PZ13 is a classic two-in-one tablet following in the footsteps of the Surface tablets. The tablet connects to a thin keyboard cover with a proprietary magnetic connector at its base with hard pins to ensure proper alignment and a secure link. A flexible band goes from the connector to the keyboard, allowing the keyboard to sit flat regardless of the angle of the tablet. 

Rather than building a kickstand into the tablet itself, Asus has gone with a magnetic cover. A back cover has a hinged kickstand that folds out about halfway down the back of the tablet to prop it up at various angles. This is effective, but not without its issues.

The magnetic hold is firm, but I have had the cover try to pop off while folding out the kickstand. The stand also struggles to hold the tablet up at high angles when used with the keyboard cover, needing the screen to rock back about 10 degrees before it’ll stand stably. Between the base of the keyboard cover and the foot of the kickstand, the Asus ProArt PZ13 doesn’t get a lot of traction on surfaces, so it can slide around a little more easily than many other laptops, though still isn’t slipping willy-nilly. 

Where I have to give Asus major props is in its decision to include the rear cover and keyboard cover with the Asus ProArt PZ13. Unlike the Microsoft Surface tablets, you won’t see a price and then find out its hundreds more to get it with a keyboard. Asus doesn’t include its pressure-sensitive stylus though. These accessories are a little curious, as I would have expected something more regal for Asus’s ProArt series, but Asus has instead gone with an outdoorsy design with military greens and an external material that feels more like camping gear. 

The tablet itself is a different story. It’s made with a firm metal unibody, has a Gorilla Glass NBT display cover, and has an IP52 rating for protection against dust and light rain. It feels tanky, and at 0.35 inches thick, it’s thinner than many laptops, though a little on the thick side for a tablet. The keyboard and kickstand also add a lot of extra depth, bringing it up to 11.5 x 7.9 x 0.71 inches.

The top-left corner of the tablet has a power button and the right edge has two volume volumes, giving the laptop a total of three hardware controls for volume with the keyboard cover attached. Two speakers also live on either side of the chassis. 

Asus has opted for an actively cooled design. Heat vents out the top edge of the Asus ProArt PZ13. One air intake sits below the volume buttons on the side of the tablet, and a curious little one is also on the back. This rear vent is wide but incredibly tight, and it’s a wonder how much air it actually can pull in. 

Asus ProArt PZ13: Keyboard, trackpad

Asus has managed to effectively carry over its laptop keyboard to the keyboard cover for the Asus ProArt PZ13. The look and some of the feel is there, though the white backlighting doesn’t evenly illuminate the keycaps. It’s a quick and functional keyboard that feels pretty good to type on, though not excellent.

The keypresses are a bit soft, and the stabilization could be better. As a result, I can type at a little over 100 words-per-minute with a bit over 95 percent accuracy, but pushing to go faster is a struggle. The keyboard cover is so thin, though, that it completely avoids creating a pressure point for the wrist or palms, feeling more like typing away on a desktop or table than on a keyboard set atop that surface.

The trackpad on the Asus ProArt PZ13 is decent and serves a few purposes. It’s impressively sizable for a trackpad built into a keyboard cover, keeping up with Asus’s other laptop trackpads. Asus puts all the extra space to good use with gesture controls along its edges.

A swipe along the left edge can adjust system volume while swipes along the right edge can change display brightness. Swiping along the top scrubs forward or backward in video, theoretically, but it can also move the cursor along text one letter at a time, though I find it jumpy and inaccurate for that task compared to the finer nuance of using the whole trackpad. These trackpad controls also overlap to some degree with buttons on the keyboard. 

In my testing, I’ve experienced a touch of wonkiness with the keyboard cover. At two points, the keyboard cover stopped working entirely, despite still being fully connected to the tablet. Disconnecting and reconnecting it several times did nothing to get it working again. Pressing the power button to lock and then unlock the system got it working again, though there’s no clear reason why this should have worked. 

The design of this keyboard attachment, like most other detachable 2-in-1 setups, doesn’t lend itself well to use on most surfaces other than tables and desks. Set on a bed, the pressure can result in weird angling of the keyboard, and set on a lap, it creates uncomfortable pressure points. This is simply something people should be aware of if they’re coming from a laptop and expecting similar utility.

Asus ProArt PZ13: Display, audio

Asus has tucked a great display into the Asus ProArt PZ13. 2880×1600 goes a long way on a 13.3-inch screen, and the OLED panel provides both excellent color gamut and contrast. The screen hits 100 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, and it even offered a measured color accuracy with maximum dE of 1.48 — accurate enough for professional work.

The display maxed out at 405 nits, though small highlights should be able to go higher. It supports Dolby Vision (though streaming services neglect PCs for high-quality streams). It’s also a touchscreen and a responsive one at that. The 60Hz refresh of the display is a bit of a letdown, as it limits how smooth the tablet can feel, especially for things like stylus input. The glossy finish is also fairly reflective, so it can depend on ideal conditions to let you make the most of the rich blacks its OLED panel can provide. 

The Asus ProArt PZ13 is a snazzy little tablet packing in a gorgeous display for content consumption and creation alike.

The speakers on the Asus ProArt PZ13 are no match for the display. They can push high volumes, but not without distorting, and this makes for rather grating audio when the speakers are pushed. That’s for music though. Movies and speech don’t get boosted quite as much, and therefore aren’t as harsh, but also aren’t as loud.

Watching a movie on the tablet, even in a fairly quiet space, I occasionally had trouble hearing everything going on. This all in spite of “Dolby Atmos support,” which is something that seems to mean very little for computers.

Asus ProArt PZ13: Webcam, microphone, biometrics

The Asus ProArt PZ13 has respectable cameras and mics. The three-mic array captures a bit of room noise, making my voice sound a little distant, but it still gets everything I’m saying. It also neutralizes background noise quite well, completely eliminating a loud box fan just feet without impacting voice quality.

The front includes a 5MP camera that’s sharp and performs decently in middling light conditions. It doesn’t capture the most colorful visuals, but it’s serviceable. It’s not quite reaching the promise of these new Snapdragon-powered machines to deliver smartphone-level camera quality though. The Asus ProArt PZ13 also includes a 13MP rear camera, but it’s not very good. It struggles to take in much light, and is therefore incredibly prone to noise. 

Microsoft’s camera app in Windows still doesn’t appear to work properly with Qualcomm’s processors. Short videos recorded on it will randomly fail to record the entirety of what was presented, even leaving out audio.

Asus omitted fingerprint scanning on the Asus ProArt PZ13, but it does include Windows Hello facial recognition, and it works fairly quickly. 

Asus ProArt PZ13: Connectivity

Typical for a tablet, the Asus ProArt PZ13 doesn’t have a lot of ports, but it makes the most of what it does have. You’ll find only one exposed USB-C port on the left edge of the Asus ProArt PZ13. Next to that is a port cover hiding away another USB-C port and a full-size SD card reader. That’s it. No headphone jack, no USB-A. Those USB-C ports are high-bandwidth USB 4.0 ports though, so at least they can support some extreme hubs. And since one of the ports is needed for charging, hubs will likely be all too critical. 

Wireless connectivity is strong with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. In testing, I had no trouble with either and enjoy fast speeds and stable connections.

Asus ProArt PZ13: Performance

Given that the Asus ProArt PZ13 is packing the lowest-tier Snapdragon processor, I’ve seen yet from the new Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus lineup, I expected performance to fall on the low side, and it certainly did. It generally fared worse in single- and multi-core performance than a handful compact thin-and-light laptops running Intel processors and even the Dell Latitude 7350 Detachable with a modest Intel Core Ultra 5 134U. That said, earlier versions of Cinebench don’t run natively on ARM, so these results show the Asus ProArt PZ13’s performance while working with the penalty of emulation. 

In Cinebench R24, which can run natively on ARM without emulation, the Asus ProArt PZ13 is a little more competent. Its single-core score of 107 outpaces the Framework Laptop 13’s Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, which hit only 101 points. And the gap in multi-core performance went from an 83 percent lead in Intel’s favor to a much more modest 12 percent lead. Against the Lenovo ThinkBook 14 2-in-1 Gen 4’s Intel Core Ultra 5 125U, the Asus ProArt PZ13 turned the tides slightly.

That said, the Asus ProArt PZ13 still falls well behind other Snapdragon X-powered laptops like the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6. And then there’s the fact that the Asus ProArt PZ13 isn’t always going to get to run native apps, and when it doesn’t the performance penalty will rear its head. 

Graphics performance follows right in line with the lackluster CPU performance. The Asus ProArt PZ13 simply couldn’t keep up with Intel Arc graphics, which are establishing a strong baseline for integrated graphics quality. Falling short even of basic Intel Graphics is a considerable letdown. 

The Asus ProArt PZ13 simply isn’t a high-performance machine. For lighter creative workloads, it may be able to keep up. And with a gorgeous display and stylus support, on-device content creation is likely what Asus had in mind when it decided to make this tablet part of its ProArt brand. But if heavy editing and video are called for, it’s probably not up to the task like its competitors are. 

Asus ProArt PZ13: Battery life

The Asus ProArt PZ13 reclaims some of its honor in battery life, where it makes a 70Wh batter — impressively large for a compact tablet — stretch on for over 16 hours. It’s a decent lead over its competitors here, especially considering Asus used a sharp OLED display.

The Framework Laptop 13, the Dell Latitude 7350 Detachable, and the Lenovo ThinkBook 13x Gen 4 all used even sharper displays. The 3:2 aspect ratio on some of these doesn’t help with battery life for LCD panels in our battery test, though. The extra vertical space in our video test ends up turning into black letterboxes that an LCD panel still tries to illuminate. In contrast, OLEDs can turn off pixels for letterboxes and conserve power. Somewhere between that, the general efficiency of the Asus ProArt PZ13, and its large battery (the second largest of the bunch), it outlasts the competition here.

That efficiency doesn’t apply just to local video playback in airplane mode, though. Doing some work with the display set to 40 percent brightness, I had the laptop on for hours as I browsed and wrote in Google Docs, and over a few hours, it drained slowly enough that it was on track to hit over 20 hours. Of course, the display is quite dim at this level. Even at 50 percent brightness, the screen is only hitting 94 nits.

Asus ProArt PZ13: Conclusion

The Asus ProArt PZ13 is a snazzy little tablet packing in a gorgeous display for content consumption and creation alike. It’s surprising to see it come in at just $1,099 and not make more sacrifices and all the more surprising that Asus includes the critical keyboard accessory that lets the Asus ProArt PZ13 serve dual purposes as a tablet and laptop. The detachable keyboard is a decent accessory, though not an excellent keyboard in its own right, and this type of laptop alternative tends not to work well on laps or soft surfaces. 

Perhaps the most critical shortcoming of the Asus ProArt PZ13 is simply its lack of performance. The chip inside is the lowest tier we’ve seen yet from the new Snapdragon X lineup, and it shows. While everyday computing is still managed easily enough, more demanding tasks will expose its weakness. And though the Asus ProArt PZ13 has good battery life, it’s also not dominating the field, as that honor belongs to the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 — a very worthy alternative for those looking for on-the-go productivity and longevity in a lightweight package.

Regardless, the Asus ProArt PZ13’s ability to switch from tablet to laptop sets it apart from basic laptops for those who need this flexibility, and its decent all-around quality helps it remain a compelling option at a competitive price.