Asus has trimmed down its Flip 13 and 15 360-degree hinge laptops to make them more portable than ever.

We’re no strangers to Asus’s Flip laptops. They have flip-over screens so you can use these laptops in a “tent” position or as a completely impractical Windows laptop.

There are a few great new elements to these new models, though. Asus has trimmed down the ZenBook Flip 13 and Flip 15 screen borders so the display takes up a full 90 per cent of their footprint. And those footprints are 10 per cent smaller than the previous models’.

Asus calls them the “world’s most compact convertible laptops”, but as laptops are dropping from IFA 2018 like rain from a storm cloud, let’s not be quite so hasty.

The trackpad of the smaller Flip 13 also has something new. LEDs underneath the pad turn it into a NUM pad at the press of a button, because there’s no physical NUM pad on the keyboard itself.

Both laptops meet the MIL-STD-810G standard according to Asus. There are more than 25 tests in this standard, and we don’t know which have been conducted. But it should mean the Flip 13 and 15 can handle drops, extreme temperatures and rain.

We don’t know what specs of Flip 13 and Flip 14 will eventually go on sale either, or how much those models will cost. However, as usual Asus offers configs up to a Core i7, using the Whiskey Lake generation of chipset, and up to 16GB RAM. They use all-SSD storage too.

Both laptops have at least 1080p-resolution displays that claim 100% sRGB gamut coverage, but the Flip 15 will also be sold with a more accurate “Pantone validated” 4K screen. That’s an optional upgrade.

Thanks to its larger size, the Flip 15 can also fit in a GeForce GTX 1050 Max-Q graphics card. This will make the laptop a reasonably formidable gaming machine. Well, as long as you don’t rely on the opinion of someone who hangs around PC gaming forums in their spare time.

The Flip 13 is obviously the much more portable of the two, weighing 1.3kg to the Flip 15’s 1.9kg. And it’s 16.9mm thick instead of 20.9mm.