Asus showed off new versions of its 13, 14 and 15-inch ZenBook laptops at IFA 2018, complete with military spec frames and NanoEdge displays.

Asus’s standard ZenBook laptops are reliably solid, well-priced laptops that are usually easy to recommend. This year we mostly get refinements, aside from a couple of noteworthy extras.

Some variants of the Asus ZenBook 13 and 14 have a trackpad with a light-up NUM pad underneath, to make up for a lack of one in the keyboard itself. All three laptop families are also tested to the MIL-STD-810G military spec.

This means they can withstand extremes of temperature and moisture, and can handle being dropped. It’s exactly the sort of resilience you may not expect from a slight, metal laptop.

Asus’s main design refinement is in the ZenBooks’ NanoEdge displays. It says the screen now fills 92 to 95 per cent of the laptop front-on, which also reduces the entire footprint.

All three also have IR cameras, for reliable Windows face unlocking even in darker conditions.

These parts aside, the new ZenBook 13, 14 and 15 have the usual crowd-pleasing array of specs. You’ll see CPUs up to the Whiskey Lake gen Core i7, up to 16GB RAM and all-SSD storage.

The smaller ZenBook 13 and 14 come with GeForce MX150 graphics in certain configs, and the ZenBook 15 can be levelled-up with the GeForce GTX 1050 Max-Q, which is far more powerful. Asus hasn’t thrown out any trusty old connectors either. All come with a full-size USB, an HDMI and either a microSD or SD card reader, as well as a USB-C port.

Claimed battery life is great too, 14 hours for the ZenBook 13 and 14, or 16 hours for the ZenBook 15. You’ll find no mind-blowing revelations here, but perhaps that’s not what you need when after a reliable new laptop.