MSI just made 2-in-1 touchscreen laptops 10x better with a hole

Touchscreen, folding, 2-in-1 laptops have often been a bit hit and miss, with one of the chief problems being that using a touchscreen with a finger is inaccurate and leaves fingerprints. As such, a stylus is nearly always a must. But, where to store your stylus? Some use magnets that stick the stylus to the side of your tablet/laptop. Some rely on a case for storage. The new MSI Prestige 16 Flip AI+ uses a hole.

As a maker of some of the best gaming laptops around, we're often more used to seeing the sheer might of its high-end gaming laptops, such as you can see in our MSI Titan 18 NX review. However, this new 2-in-1 is all about slick design and portable convenience.

The all-important hole in this machine sits on its underside. A little slot has been carved out of the section where are strip of rubber acts as the front foot for this laptop, and into this slot you can stow your stylus. A little clip holds it in place, ensuring there's no chance it will go walkies while you're on the move, and a press of the clip will release the pointer.

It's not technically the first laptop to include a stylus storage facility - far from it, in fact - but they're still vanishingly rare.

Along with this portable convenience, the stylus for this laptop also boasts very long battery life, and the laptop will charge it while it's stowed. The accuracy of the stylus is also excellent. Any wibblywobblyness you can see in the writing below is merely my handwriting, not the fault of the stylus.

Elsewhere, this is a fairly typical laptop of this type, with a slim and sleek aluminum exterior, a hinge that can rotate 360° to have the lid fold flat over the keyboard or all the way around the other side to make for a giant tablet. With a visually superb but large 16-inch OLED screen, it's quite the device to wield. However, again, the stylus makes all the difference, with sketching and writing on the large surface being effortless, with no issues from palm interference during my hands on time with the device.

Arriving later this year sporting Intel's new Core Ultra 9 386H "Panther Lake" CPUs - which include much-improved integrated graphics that are actually decent for gaming compared to previous Intel chips - this is one to keep an eye on if you want a truly versatile laptop for design and sketching work.