ASUS ExpertBook P1 review: Does what it is meant to do and does it well
To say ASUS has been doing really well in the Indian consumer market for the past two years or so wouldn’t be wrong.
While offering enterprise products for years, new ASUS ExpertBook P1 (and P3) are now not limited to corporate bulk orders—they can now be purchased by customers online.
Starting at a base price of ₹39,990, I have been using the beefier ExpertBook that’s priced at ₹72,990 for a while, and here’s how the experience has been using it:
The laptop comes in a matte finish and doesn’t catch smudges or fingerprints often. The Misty Grey colour looks like a typical enterprise laptop that might remind you of Dell’s Latitude series of laptops... and that isn’t a bad thing at all.
The 14-inch LCD screen (16:9 aspect ratio) has not too thick (but certainly not thin) bezels around it with the ASUS ExpertBook branding at the bottom. The outside of the lid gets the branding, too, though it’s a little less subtle here.
The right side houses a USB 3.2 gen-1 type-A port, a gigabit LAN port; while the left side carries another USB 3.2 gen-1 type-A port, an HDMi 1.4 port surrounded by two USB 3.2 gen-2 type-C ports.
The laptop weighs a little over 1.6kg and is light enough to be carried around for work and its thickness isn’t too bad for work profile either. The bottom has elongated rubberised legs for little vents alongside. The hinge seems solid and smooth when the screen is opened to a 180-degree angle.
The backlit keyboard gets 1.35mm key travel and is really comfortable to type on. There’s enough space between the keys and the keys are just about soft enough to not be a deal breaker. The trackpad is large and also houses the physical fingerprint scanner, which is decent in terms of reliability and quickness but could have been a little better in both aspects.
The 720p webcam has a physical shutter for privacy and is decent enough for making video calls or an odd photo capture requirement but don’t expect too much from it.
The 14-inch full HD (1920x1080) LCD (IPS) display does a good job when reading text and editing documents but does seem to have slightly washed colours for watching high-resolution videos—but that’s not its main purpose. It is sufficiently bright to be used under sunlight when cranked to the highest brightness. There’s an anti-glare coating on it that does help in keeping the glare off it to some extent.
The laptop is powered by Intel’s 13th gen i7-13620H chip (2.4 GHz to 4.9 GHz 10-core processor) with 32GB DDR5 RAM (base model has 8GB can be expanded to 64GB) and 1TB M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD. You wouldn’t find the laptop to show any troubles in handling document editing, working in spreadsheets, or having multiple web browsers opened with several tabs each while playing a music track in the background. It opens images quickly and doesn’t struggle to play high-resolution videos online or from the local disk.
Of course, it’s not meant for any serious gaming playback. Only occasionally did the fan produce a lot more sound than expected under both performance and standard modes. Otherwise, this machine does what it’s meant to do and does it well.
There's no WiFi 6E but WiFi 5 is reliable, and the gigabit LAN port can also complete the overall connectivity offering.
Equipped with a 50Wh battery cell, the laptop lasted 7-8 hours consistently on the default balance mode and took nearly two hours to charge using the bundled 65-watt charger. The speakers are okay and somewhat loud but nothing special that can be used for video calls but perhaps not much for consuming entertainment content.
All in all, the ExpertBook P1 is a nice and functional work machine that has a good build quality, decent display and good battery life to get your work done and maybe some music in the background without any performance issues alongside.
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