The Porsche Design Book One Is a perfect example of what happens when you combine an aesthetically pleasing design with power.
If you’ve ever seen anything from Porsche Design, you will notice the simplicity and minimalist design they tend to go for, nothing too extravagant but makes a statement. That is no different with the Book One and besides what it’s made of, even the hinges are designed to be eye-catching.
Porsche Design already has their name on watches, headphones, pens, notebooks, wallets and even smartphones such as the Huawei Mate 9 Porsche Design edition. They are designed to be high-end and aimed at those seeking more.
Designed in Germany and manufactured by Quanta Computer in Taiwan, it’s a combined effort from Intel, Quanta and PorscheDesign. Every detail of its design takes inspiration from Porsche cars, for example, the heat dissipation grills, the gear-like 360 hinges and the brushed aluminium finishing.
Pick it up and you will notice how light it is, and it’s also very thin, at just 15.9mm thick. In fact, some elements of the Book One reminds us of Microsoft’s offering, but with just a bit more oomph in design quality. This is no ordinary 2-in-1 laptop either, it’s mechanical hinge allows it to swing 360-degree as well as allowing its display to be detached.
Although we didn’t spend enough time to test viewing angles of its 3200×1800 pixels IPS resolution display, it looks glossy and Porsche mentioned it’s protected by Gorilla Glass 4. There’s a 5MP front camera for Skype calls perhaps, and an infrared camera for Windows Hello face authentication feature.
Just like the Surface Book Pro, you have a detachable stylus, but to remain consistent with the rest of the Book One’s aluminium design, the stylus is also aluminium designed with Wacom. It looks snazzy too and I think if you lose it, someone can resell for the value of a cheap laptop.
For those that care about anything other than design, under its aluminium body, the Book One packs an Intel 7th-generation Kaby Lake Core i7-7500U processor, coupled with 16GB of LPDDR3 RAM (at 1,866MHz) and 512GB SSD storage powering the pre-installed Windows 10 Pro operating system. When it comes to graphics, it uses Intel’s HD Graphics 620 which is more than enough for everyday use.
Battery life is not lacking either, it offers 14 hours of battery usage which is very decent. Elsewhere, you have a lot of port options unlike Apple’s new laptops; you have two full USB 3.0 ports on the keyboard, a USB Type-C, a Thunderbolt 3.1 on the tablet and inside the box you have the adaptors needed for connectivity.
All in all, it’s definitely not a laptop for everyone; it’s expensive and you could probably pick up something cheaper that offers the same level if not better performance, however, if you decide to get something for the price point, it seems to have a good balance of performance and design, and for the Book One’s price tag? €2795
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