6 days Ago By Aditya Madanapalle
Asus has just launched the ExpertBook P1 along with the P3 and the P5. Asus is squarely looking at a segment of customers who might not know that Enterprise Laptops will suit their requirements. The ExpertBook P1 is an upgradable device with robust construction, packed with security features and advanced on-device AI capabilities.
New Delhi: ExpertBook is the branding for Asus laptops in its enterprise segment. These laptops are typically customised and purchased in large quantities by companies for their employees, and are designed to be used as non-personal laptops. They are hardy, adequately secured, providing advanced system tuning capabilities, supported by a wide service network.
Each of the laptops are also platforms that can be customized according to the requirement of the user. They have more exacting security features to secure the device and the data. Such laptops may benefit small and medium enterprise owners, lawyers, doctors, architects and accountants who deal with sensitive data, but may be using a consumer laptop without being aware that there is a segment that caters to their specific requirements.
Asus has tied up with Flipkart to bring its new range of ExpertBook laptops to anyone who wants one. These are individual devices with preset configurations. The new Intel-powered P1, P3 and P5, which are the essential, premium and flagship devices are packed with intelligence.
The approach is for serving customers who will benefit from enterprise-grade laptops. The ExpertBook P1 ships in a barebones box with nothing but the laptop, the charging cable and instruction manuals within it. We are actually excited that such an offering is available in the general market, here is an in-depth look.
Asus ExpertBook P1 build and design This is a sleek and stylish enterprise laptop, but one that manages to have a robust, solid construction nonetheless. The material is primarily plastic, but do not let the interiors fool you, the internals are braced by steel, which allows the chassis to bear 30 kg of weight right at the centre. If you are worried about the laptop getting crushed during commutes, then the ExpertBook P1 should give no problems on that front.
Slick. (Image Credit: Aditya Madanapalle/News9). The branding on the lid looks like a nametag or conference badge, and is styled according to the demands of the lune.
The ExpertBook branding is also beneath the display, and embossed into the base, and a nearly invisible branding on the back edge of the display which cannot be seen when the laptop is being used. The display has a 16:9 ratio, and Asus has opted to not use the 16:10 ratio for this model. The downside is that the aspect ratio is slightly unsuitable for sites that arrange the content vertically, and displays a few fewer lines in spreadsheets.
The upside is multimedia consumption, with the display matching the aspect ratio of modern video content. The fingerprint sensor is fast and accurate. (Image Credit: Aditya Madanapalle/News9).
A camera is located right at the centre of the display, which has a couple of microphones on either side of it. There is also a physical shutter to the camera, which is something that we feel is essential for any laptop with an integrated camera. The hinge is not two sided, and stretches along the base, nearly covering its entire width.
This robust hinge allows the lid to open up by 180 degrees, which is great for sharing the screen around in a conference room setting. This hinge has been tested to open and close 50,000 times, and will easily outlast the laptop itself. The physical shutter gives you peace of mind, and is just one of many security features on the laptop.
(Image Credit: Aditya Madanapalle/News9). The keyboard and the display sit in slight depressions, preventing contact when closed and the ugly marks appearing on the screen. Now the keyboard has a number of innovations which we would like to get into.
The first four function keys have a blue underline that makes them easy to find at a glance. The keyboard is backlit with blue-white light, similar to the most massive stars in the universe. The trackpad is generous, but not large enough to capture accidental palm presses, and not as large as the trackpads in other Asus laptops.
The trackpad has a fingerprint sensor in the corner, which is accurate and reliable. The keyboard is fast and comfortable. (Image Credit: Aditya Madanapalle/News9).
The power button is incredibly innovative, it has a shorter profile, has a differentiating light at the corner, and takes more pressure to trigger, differentiating it from all the other keys. Asus has made it impossible to accidentally or unintentionally press the power button, which is great design for me. The backslash key and the Enter key appear to be fused but are not.
We really liked the fact that the left and right keys are not compressed like the up and down keys, so even if you are playing games on the device, which it is not designed for, the most used keys are comfortable to operate. This is a CoPilot+ laptop so the right CTRL key has been replaced with a dedicated CoPilot button. Asus offers a holistic package in terms of I/O ports.
(Image Credit: Aditya Madanapalle/News9). There are two USB-C ports on the left side, either of which can be used to juice up the device. There is also a USB-A port and an HDMI port, along with a 3.
5 mm audio jack. On the right side is a slot for a Kensington Lock, a full-sized LAN port, and another USB-A port. In terms of I/O options, the ExpertBook P1 provides anything that you would possibly need, no matter what your requirements are.
There are no vents on all the sides of the machine! There are also vents on the back of the device which are almost impossible to spot, they are cleverly, almost deviously hidden behind the hinge when it is opened or closed. There are more vents on the bottom of the device, where rubber feet provide some room for the speakers as well as the fans. A full-sized RJ45 port is just old school cool.
(Image Credit: Aditya Madanapalle/News9). The base of the device has a clean finish with a slight texture, and is almost as beautiful to look at as all the other sides of the laptop. The vents are all towards the back, providing users with a sneak peek at the fresh silicon packed inside.
The speakers are positioned towards the front of the device, partially directed downwards, and partially directed outwards, which provides a stereo sound without muffling. The setup is great for unwinding with some multimedia content at the end of a busy day of work. There is a slight groove on the base that allows the lid to be easily lifted.
While the base does not rise up when the lid is opened, there is some lift as the lid is completely pushed back. This laptop is beautiful on the inside as well. The battery is ridiculously thin.
There is plenty of copper piping in the large heat sink to transport the heat. The ports are reinforced. (Image Credit: Aditya Madanapalle/News9).
Overall, we have no problems with the design. Asus has managed to pack the whole laptop into less than 2 cm, with the device weighing around 1.6 kg.
This is a convenient laptop to lug around, use outdoors, and as an actual laptop. The construction is exquisite, and complies with the US MIL-STD 810H military grade standard. More than a quarter of the material used in the laptop is sustainably sourced.
There is nothing that we would change about the device, how it is configured, how the I/O slots are positioned. Additionally, the RAM and memory on the device can be upgraded according to the requirements of the user. Asus ExpertBook P1 Performance In terms of performance, we are happy to say that we pushed this device to its absolute limits.
Normally, that would involve instantly downloading a bunch of games on an enterprise laptop to find out how it performs on the benchmarks. This does not really give a good idea of where the laptop falls short in the use case that it was made for. The first thing that we were pleased to note is that the on-board graphics have improved significantly compared to the previous version.
The processor is getting really powerful. The security features kick in on startup itself. (Image Credit: Aditya Madanapalle/News9).
Now there are some tasks that depend entirely on the processor and does not improve if there is a discrete GPU, and how powerful the discrete GPU is. The best example of such a task is sound generation on Audacity. We clocked the creation of 30 second tracks at two minutes, which is on the faster side.
The device is a multitasking beast, and we were able to run TaleSpire, Discord and Open Broadcasting Software Studio all at once. There were no slowdowns, and the laptop performed without getting hot or noisy through a demanding four hour session. It is possible to work for an entire day without needing to juice up.
(Image Credit: Aditya Madanapalle). We were also recording using Asus ExpertMeet, which was transcribing all the text. We will circle back to that.
We also used the laptop for a use case that it was not designed for, building games on Godot, developing software using the Subtle Text editor, and using some AI-heavy pipelines that combined cloud and local generative capabilities. This is where the laptop started struggling and hiccoughing a bit, but not much. Once more than about seven tabs are opened, there are rendering artifacts and slowdowns noticeable.
These tabs were all ‘heavy’, such as Codepen, Google Sheets, Qwen, ChatGPT, X, Deepseek and Grok. The text may not appear on screen as rapidly as it is typed out, and some buttons may just stop working. The speakers are angled towards the bottom and the sides.
(Image Credit: Aditya Madanapalle/News9). The camera is a high-resolution camera with a wide field of view. The 1080 FHD camera is overkill for most conference calls with multiple participants, and performs admirably in low-light settings.
The camera is automatically set to use AI framing, so it does not use the full width by default, nor does it provide users with the controls to tweak these. You need to switch to basic camera in system settings to remove the AI framing. The MyAsus app does have additional granular options available, but even when given access to the system camera through settings, it does not change anything.
You can end up getting what you want, that is use the camera with or without the AI framing, but doing that requires going through a lot of jumps instead of the settings being available easily in the camera app, the system settings or MyAsus. The camera is wide enough to accommodate multiple people in a group call. (Image Credit: Aditya Madanapalle/News9).
Bear in mind that the laptop is not designed for such heavy usage, and most users will have no problems for everyday office tasks and for meeting any entertainment requirements. For conference calls or group calls, it is possible to use the device on its own without any peripheral devices attached. Asus offers AI noise cancellation for not just the speaker, but for the other speakers as well, allowing for crystal clear calls.
The wide field of view allows multiple participants to get on call using the same device, and the audio works just fine in such situations, the entire technology desk at News9 tried this out. The volume reaches a maximum of 77 decibels, which is on the lower side but ideal for this device, which does not need to scream. The audio is still at comfortable levels for personal use by one user.
The screen opens by 180 degrees and is great for sharing around a conference table. (Image Credit: Aditya Madanapalle/News9). The laptop does not run Stable Diffusion natively because the GPU was not powerful enough.
We got a version with a Core i7 to try out, but the device is available with an i5 and an i9 as well. We got 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, which can be upgraded up to 64 GB. We also got the version with 500 GB of storage space, which can be upgraded to one TB.
We were pretty satisfied with the configuration of the laptop, and the device is ideal for those looking to upgrade the device later after purchasing it. A number of synthetic benchmarks are embedded below, and we did not try out any gaming benchmarks as we had a good handle on the performance of the ExpertBook P1, which is not meant for gaming anyway. Expertbook P1 Benchmarks by Aditya Madanpalle As in all of its devices, Asus provides a whole bunch of software to make the users get the most out of their laptops.
The Asus Expert Widget allows users to programme the function keys, beyond the switching between system default and OEM assigned. The Expert Panel is a handy little tool to access the AI features such as translation and noise cancellation, as well as an option to record the screen. This Expert Panel is useful for conference calls.
Then there is the ExpertMeet software that provides transcriptions of calls for up to six hours, along with summaries, and the capabilities of recording the conference calls. The vents on the back are cleverly positioned and nearly impossible to see. (Image Credit: Aditya Madanapalle/News9).
We found that the transcription by the tool was not very accurate, at least not for Indic accents talking about a fictional, fantasy realm, while putting on a variety of accents (yeah, we were playing Dungeons and Dragons). I expected a nice little summary at the end of the session, but the transcript is not saved even though it is generated. Obtaining the transcript and the summary takes a bit of extra time, especially for the longer recordings.
There are options to export the text transcript captured in realtime though, as well as the audio recording in a variety of formats. Verdict One thing that we really liked about the laptop is that both the RAM and storage are upgradeable. The thermal solution is one of the highlights of the device, that really ensures that the machine can use the fresh silicon at its limits.
The heat sink is large, the vents stretch all the way across the base, and the dust protection mesh keeps the vents and fans from clogging up, so this is a device that will work in places that are hot, humid and dusty. The I/O ports are braced with metal as well, and can literally support nine kgs of weight, and you can test this out if you have a weight attached to a usb cable. The laptop can shrug off 78 cc of liquid spill, so this is a really robust laptop.
This is a reliable laptop. (Image Credit: Aditya Madanapalle/News9). Now the laptop is packed with security features, and if you want peace of mind about your data, then this is the laptop for you.
The optical chassis intrusion detection is a feature gives you an alert if someone accesses the chassis, to say pop out the SSD, read the data, and return it without anyone being the wiser. There is also a self-healing bios that checks the BIOS version on every startup against a copy stored in an isolated, secure portion of the memory, which prevents hackers from getting a persistent foothold on the machine through rootkits. This laptop is secured against advanced threat actors, not just script kiddies.
The ExpertBook P1 will do fine in rugged, outdoor use. (Image Credit: Aditya Madanapalle/News9). The 65 watt C-type charger can juice up your phone as well as the laptop, and the laptop can itself be juiced up by any phone charger, or even a power bank.
We prefer to use the even sleeker GAN charger, but the one in the box is lightweight and mobile as well. Now the prices for the ExpertBook P1 starts at Rs 39,990, which is close to the bulk rate that enterprises would get. There are also introductory offers with certain cards, and extended three year service plan, and subscriptions.
The ExpertBook P1 will go on sale on 21 April, along with the P3 and the P5. Click for more latest Review news . Also get top headlines and latest news from India and around the world at News9.
Aditya has studied journalism, multimedia technologies and ᚨᚾᚲᛁᛖᚾᛏ ᚱᚢᚾᛖᛋ. He has over 10 years experience as a science and technology reporter, with a focus on space, AI, videogames, cybsersecurity and fundamental research. He is usually found playing with age inappropriate LEGO sets or sedentary games both new and old.
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