One of ASUS’s lineup of laptops is the ExpertBook series. It’s the ExpertBook B1 B1402, and it’s a laptop series that most people don’t know or have seen before.
Okay, here’s a quick introduction to the entire ExpertBook series. They’re not meant for end users like you and me, but they’re meant for businesses that need reliability with extended warranties.
The ExpertBook series has 3-year global warranty with local on-site service, 3-year battery warranty, and a 1-year Perfect Warranty whereby you only have to pay 20% of the cost to repair damages pertaining drops, breaks, liquid spills and electrical surges.
The ExpertBook series is very easy to identify its tiers. There’s the B1 and B3 listed as the essential needs, then there’s the B5 for the more advanced needs, and both B7 and B9 that’s stated as “premium”. Essentially, the tiering is kinda following the hierarchy of a corpo ladder.
Now, back to this ExpertBook B1 laptop. I have to say, this laptop looks great. It has a minimalist look with a super smooth finish that – surprisingly, doesn’t attract that much fingerprints. It’s also very lightweight, at only 1.49kg while measuring at only 2cm thin.
Since this laptop is meant for business uses, the ports available here are great. We have Ethernet, USB-C, and USB-A alongside HDMI and a Kensington lock. Best of all, this laptop is charged via USB-C too. We can use any USB-PD chargers or power banks with the appropriate wattage. All good so far.
The keyboard ASUS included in the ExpertBook B1 is also decent. It’s good to type on as it is springy and bouncy, though the texture on the keycaps are… strange. The spacebar feels weird and loud.
The trackpad works well as its tracking and palm rejection is good, though the size of this trackpad is really small. I think ASUS knows most people are going to use an external mouse anyway, that’s why they have a USB 2.0 Type-A on this laptop that is perfect for an external mouse.
For our specific configuration, it comes with a trackpad with a fingerprint scanner too.
What I’m not happy about this laptop is arguably the most important thing on a laptop – the screen. It’s a 14-inch 1080p TN panel. Now, there are different grades of TN panels as there are good TN panels but there are also bad TN panels. Unfortunately for this ExpertBook B1 B1402, it’s the worst kind of TN panel.
It literally hurts my eyes by just staring at it for 2 seconds. It doesn’t matter which angle I look at it, it hurts my eyes. Still, I did the color accuracy test and as expected, it’s horrible. 57.39% of sRGB and 41.11% of DCI-P3 color gamut coverage and only about 270 nits of maximum brightness.
I mean, seriously — if this laptop is meant to be for the executives in the companies that spend most of the time looking at a screen to do their work, then I expect the laptop’s screen to be better than this or the company has some sort of compensation for damaging the employee’s eyes.
The specs on this laptop is not bad either. It comes with an Intel Core i5-1335U, 512GB SSD, 8GB of DDR4 RAM at 3200MT/s, and equipped with integrated graphics. You can upgrade it to Iris Xe by upgrading it to a dual-channel RAM.
If you want to upgrade the RAM yourself, you actually can. We can open up the backpanel by unscrewing a few Philips screws and the whole thing can be popped off.
And there’s the SO-DIMM RAM slot. That aforementioned 8GB RAM is soldered onto the motherboard and we can only access this if we choose to upgrade the laptop. I mean, we should be using at least 16GB in this laptop anyway since 8GB of RAM in Windows 11 is seriously insufficient.
Both the SSD and the WiFi card can be swapped out if we want to, but the default one is good enough.
Should you buy the ASUS ExpertBook B1 (B1402)?
Okay, at the end of the day, this ExpertBook B1 is priced at RM3,899. As I mentioned earlier, this laptop is not meant for you and I. You should be buying this laptop in bulk for your team to use within a company. Even with that in mind, I definitely won’t recommend this specific configuration because of the screen. It’s horrible, and that’s the reason why this laptop review does not have a battery life segment. I just couldn’t look at the screen for that long.
You could mitigate that issue by using an external monitor since it supports DisplayPort Alt Mode on one of the USB-C ports, or just use the HDMI port – but that defeats the portability of a laptop.
I’m not sure if we can have a custom-order ExpertBook B1 with an IPS LCD screen. If that is the option, then it should be more expensive but I can assure you, that’s going to be a necessary upgrade.
But that will also jack up the price even further. Maybe it’s worth the warranty? That’s something that you’ll have to negotiate with dealers and compare the price with other providers.
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