Review: Asus Pro B9440
If you are a corporate user and you travel a lot, you likely want a laptop that balances light weight with power. That’s a hard balance for any PC company to keep. Asus is trying to walk that line with the Asus Pro B9440 business laptop.
Now this is a laptop that weighs in at 1.05Kg or 2.3 pounds even though the case is made of metal. That’s not going to weigh you down while you sprint across the airport terminal to catch your flight, and it explains why it’s MIL-STD 810G rated for durability. It is also spill resistant for those who like to work and drink their Starbucks coffee. It is slim and has a pair of USB 3 ports on the sides of the screen near the hinge (but only the one on the left side can charge it which is kind of strange) as well as a headphone jack on the left center edge. Two speakers are on the bottom front edge that sound great when I tested it by playing The Who. Above the power button is a fingerprint reader which works with Windows Hello. The keyboard itself is really comfortable to type on, and it’s at at an angle that favors a touch typist like myself. Plus the touchpad is a decent size. But kind of finicky. Finally, the 14″ HD screen is almost bezel-less. But what is weird is that it is missing a webcam which I would have expected to find on a business class laptop. It’s also matte which while it cuts down on the vibrancy of the colors, it makes the screen glare free. Bonus points come in the form of a sleeve to put the laptop into that is included.
The laptop comes to the table with Windows 10 Pro. It does its tricks via a 2.5 Ghz Intel Core i5 processor with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage. You get 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0. Graphic processing comes in the form of a 128MB dedicated Intel HD Graphics 620 chipset. The whole package works well. It’s quick to boot. As in 10 seconds or so from the time you press the power button to when you see the login page. I really couldn’t get it to slow down whether I was surfing the web or streaming video. Though it did get warm when I really pushed it. Battery life was in the order of roughly 9 hours which is what I expect, and you should expect from a laptop of this type. If you need to charge it, you can get 50% of a charge in 30 minutes. That is a plus for someone who’s always running from meeting to meeting and is away from an AC outlet from extended period of time.
One thing that the Asus Pro B9440 has in its favor is price. At roughly $1300, it is in line with most of the competition from Dell, Lenovo and HP. If you’re someone who travels a fair bit and need a light laptop, and you can live without a webcam, I’d consider the Asus Pro B9440 for your laptop needs. It’s light, durable, and will handle your typical office related tasks with ease while giving you plenty of battery life to make through a business day.
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