The Asus Expertbook B7 Flip offers great flexibility. You can work anywhere with its 5G connectivity. And as a Windows 2-in-1 convertible, you can easily switch between laptop and tablet forms — it supports a stylus, too. Imagine making a presentation before flipping the screen and handling over a stylus to a customer to sign off on a deal. Equally impressive are its performance and the generous number of ports, though its business-centric features come at a price.

I really like the Expertbook's textured finish. It has a hint of friction that somewhat improves the grip. Tiny flecks of bright bits are embedded throughout the chassis. They look like glitter, but are less shiny, and help to make the laptop less bland. More importantly, the laptop chassis, which has US military-grade certification, should be able to take a few knocks on the go. At 1.44kg, the Expertbook is slightly heavier than recent Asus ultrabooks like the Zenbook 14 OLED. Of course, its size and weight make the Expertbook awkward to use purely as a tablet. But it's fine if you're merely taking notes or sketching with the Asus Active Stylus (optional, S$69) on a desk. Like some Asus laptops, you can enable a numeric keypad overlay over the touchpad. This touchpad is wider than usual, but I would have liked it being a bit taller instead.

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Unlike Asus' recent consumer notebooks, the Expertbook doesn't have a lovely OLED screen. Instead, its 14-inch IPS touchscreen has a built-in privacy filter (Fn + 2 shortcut) that darkens the display and reduces its visibility, especially from the sides. But while this Asus Private View works similarly to the privacy filter in the Acer Travelmate P6, I found the P6 to be more effective at obscuring the contents of the screen. But what the Expertbook does better than most, is the sheer number of I/O ports. It's really astonishing how Asus managed to squeeze every port you'd need into the Expertbook. I mean, there's even a mini-DisplayPort and a micro-HDMI. The latter can be used (via an included dongle) for wired Ethernet. Mind you, Asus also had to place the power and volume control buttons at the sides next to these ports, as the Expertbook is a convertible.

But for all its glorious ports, what puts the Expertbook over many of its competitors is 5G connectivity. It means you can work anywhere securely without being at the mercy of possibly insecure and unstable public Wi-Fi networks. Further adding to this portability is the Expertbook's good battery life. It lasted 7hr 15min in our video-loop battery test at maximum brightness. You can easily get a whole workday's worth of uptime out of this convertible for typical productivity workloads. While the Expertbook only has a 11th-gen Core i7 processor, this i7-1195G7 model is a higher-clocked version that goes up to 5GHz in clock speed. This is probably why the Expertbook's 5,091 PCMark 10 score can rival that of the Huawei Matebook 14s (4,965) and its more power-hungry H-series Core i7 processor.

Users shopping for a business-centric Windows 2-in-1 convertible will find slim pickings in the market. Most 2-in-1 devices are consumer-oriented. It's even harder to find one with 5G support like the Expertbook B7 Flip. The number of ports on the Expertbook are very impressive, while its general performance and battery life are great. However, it's relatively pricey — my Core i7 review set costs S$3,598 — especially when compared to a consumer model. Prices start at S$3,198 for the Core i5 model (with 8GB RAM and 512GB SSD) on the Asus Store. You can also find it on Lazada.

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Note: Review unit provided by Asus.