HP Envy 13 review

In more ways than one, the HP Envy 13 seems like a "new generation" of PC laptop for HP or even the industry. Intentional or not it bears more in resemblance with Apple's lineup than its own predecessors, it's part of the very first wave of computers with Windows 7 pre-installed, it places a large emphasis on battery life but still manages great performance, and it's a "luxury" PC that actually provides some pretty good excuses for its inflated pricetag. We've spent a nice solid week with the laptop, so find out if the Envy 13 can live up to its promise after the break.

Hardware

As is our wont, we're writing up this review on the laptop itself, providing us with a great vantage point for taking in all of the laptop's triumphs and flaws. The entire laptop runs very cool to the touch, especially in the palm rest, which is textured with an odd (but not distracting) pattern of dug out squares. The curved metal edge that runs around the laptop comes to a rather sharp edge, similar to that of a MacBook Pro, and is slightly uncomfortable if our wrists are laid heavily across it. Ports-wise there's very little to keep track of, with a power plug and SD card slot on the left (the Envy 13 actually comes with its user manual on a 2GB SD card, a nice touch), and two USB ports, HDMI and hybrid audio plug for headphones and / or a mic on the right side. Quite similar to the MacBook, there's actually a bit of opportunity for pinching yourself in the dropped hinge, though HP opted for vents on the left and right side of the laptop instead of up through the hinge -- obviously to good effect. The fan is usually on, but quiet enough not to be a bother. The back of the lid is plain gunmetal, with just a bit of indication of which way is up to help us find the little lip to lift the display open -- it's held in place by a just-right magnetic latch. The whole laptop is quite light "enough" for the size, balances well on a lap, and can be carried one-handed open quite easily for that impromptu relocation from armchair to couch.

The keys are a lightweight, dull, squared-off plastic, and encompass all the laptop's functionalities -- none of those pesky capacitive-actuated brightness or volume controls here. You actually have to hold the function key to use one of the F1-F12 keys for its original purpose, but that's hardly a loss, since we do a lot more volume adjustment that archaic function commands. Unfortunately, the keys feel a little "weak" for our taste, bordering on a cheap feel due to the slightly loose, plastic clack of them. There's not a lot of push-back when typing, making touch typing a bit less pleasant. It's not horrible, just not our ideal keyboard -- and the lack of a backlight seems odd in this otherwise "luxury" package.

We've already mentioned the stunning screen, and we really can't overstate how nice it is. It's very bright, and the colors are just ultra-rich -- though out of the box it's tinted a tad red to our eyes. Oddly enough 1600 x 900 seems like a near ideal resolution for a 13-inch screen. We've got significantly more information than a regular WXGA resolution at this size, but no real eye strain at the pixel density. The glare is annoying, however. At the moment we're sitting far away from daylight windows, and some utterly boring overhead fluorescents are providing a significant enough nuisance to be a bother. Sure, there are plenty of other computers that are just this bad, but that doesn't make it right. There's also auto-dimming of the display when on battery, which can't be easily overcome with the brightness keys, a slight annoyance.

HP has "Beats" branded sound, which apparently means artist-approved circuitry -- though there's nothing particular like a more powerful amp or any particular added component to separate the sound output from a regular laptop. Compared to a MacBook Pro, a golden-eared friend of ours detected a slight improvement in stereo separation and clarity, along with just a touch of "punchier" bass. If you're really after this laptop for its sound properties, you'll be best served testing it out yourself or finding a more detailed review of that aspect, but most people probably won't be able to detect a difference in quality. At least there's nothing bad like a buzz coming off of the 1/8-inch plug as we've had with some shoddier laptops.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Envy 13 is the optional slice battery, which promises to more than double the battery life of the computer. Even better, it doesn't do too much damage to the thickness or weight of the laptop -- basically turning it from a thin-and-light 13-inch laptop to a "regular" 13-incher, which isn't that bad of a tradeoff. Unfortunately, HP's battery life predictions are woefully overstated compared to what a typical user will get untethered. For instance, we ran down a full charge on the standard battery in a bit over two hours with the screen at near-full brightness and WiFi on, merely listening to iTunes and typing into a Google doc. Sure, there are a bunch of optimizations that can be done to milk more out of the battery, but we were hoping for a little more with the discrete graphics off (the default when the laptop is unplugged, though you can override) and this small of screen to power. The slice more than doubles that battery life, so we're looking at 5+ hours using this thing full tilt, and with lowered brightness and WiFi off (like on an airplane) we'd say 8+ hours is totally reasonable. What's unreasonable is that HP markets this with an "up to 18 hours" figure (16ish with our non-ULV configuration like ours) from a Mobile Mark benchmark -- which is kind of like lying. Just because everybody does it doesn't make it right.

And at last we arrive at the real bone to pick with this laptop: the horrible trackpad. At first blush it doesn't look too bad, since it's large, non-glossy and relatively unadorned. It's lacking buttons, like Apple's recent MacBooks, but that didn't end the world or anything, did it? Well, somebody botched this part bad. HP apparently forgot that axing the buttons means making darn well sure the software is pitch-perfect. And it isn't. Whether Synaptics is to blame for its drivers or hardware, or HP for the configuration, at the end of the day HP is the one that's selling this $1,700 laptop to people with a basically non-usable trackpad. The primary problem is that the pad is designed to be clicked when there's only one finger on it, so if we're using an index finger to mouse and a thumb to click, we have to lift the index finger when we click. The other problem is that when the thumb is present, it has a tendency to throw off the tracking of the index finger. There are also problems with sensitivity when it comes to scrolling and other gestures, but we find ourselves getting better at tracing gestures over the soft touch material -- it just takes a steady hand and a little bit of luck. We're sure some crazy person could eventually become adept at the trackpad, and we could see how some executive at the company could've rubber stamped the part after spending 30 seconds with it and declaring "it kind of looks like Apple's pad," but we're not sure how a computer company that's been building laptops for a couple decades could really send a computer out the door in good conscience with a primary input device that's this abysmal.

HP Envy 13 unboxing

Software / performance

So, this is the first Windows 7 pre-installed laptop that we've gotten to play with extensively, and it's a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, it's been nice to not worry at all about drivers -- everything "just works" to an even greater extent than before. On the other hand, once Windows 7 has been bogged down with all the trappings of a shipping system, it starts to lose a bit of its allure. For instance, we're looking at a roughly one minute boot time (usually a bit under 59 seconds, and we're tracking all the way to an actually responsive desktop) -- we said "snappy" in our first impressions, but that's probably because we're not super picky once things get near the one minute mark. So, not terrible, but it's not exactly that sub-30 second holy grail we've all been waiting on. There are other little annoyances brought on by a commercial install, like the fact that Norton would really, really like us to install it -- and in fact won't let us dismiss its installation warnings. We know, we're playing with fire by avoiding anti-virus, but the fact that we have to install Norton before we can uninstall it is pretty crazy. What if we had our own anti-virus software we wanted to install? The copy of IE 8 is also pretty laughable, packed with a space-wasting HP toolbar with Bing search, and then of course IE's regular Bing search box and then an HP-branded AOL as the default homepage.

Part of that start-up time is the instant-on Linux, though it's a very brief pit-stop on boot if you just click the friendly Windows icon on the bottom left corner instead of waiting for the 20 second countdown. It can be deactivated, but we kind of find it reassuring that we can do the Linux thing whenever it strikes our fancy. Unfortunately, one of the large drawbacks of the instant-on system is that there's no two-finger scrolling with the track pad, which makes web browsing a bit of a chore. Interestingly, when you use a Google account to set up email or a calendar, it actually creates a web applet for viewing Gmail or Gcal directly, instead of importing the info into an app -- bad for offline use (it's Google Gears incompatible) but great for consistency in experience.

Speaking of consistency, and back on the Windows side of things, we found it weird that the volume controls have a screen overlay "progress bar" style indicator, while brightness did not. There was also no visual indication of the playback control buttons, and they didn't have any impact on iTunes when it was a background app.

HP's own MediaSmart apps are kind of hit or miss. They're pretty light on features compared to regular desktop counterparts, have controls that are designed for a touchscreen, and don't integrate well with the rest of Windows. Still, the webcam app with its Photo Booth-style effects and YouTube upload is pretty nice, and at least HP is keeping an eye out for these sorts of value-adds. Also shipping with the computer are a pair of much-more-helpful Corel apps: Paint Shop Pro Photo and VideoStudio.

One concern on the software side is that as 64-bit really becomes popular with Windows 7 and new hardware, general users who just buy a computer aren't going to necessarily know which version of applications to download -- it's not like there's a sticker that says "64-bit" anywhere on the machine. We suppose we'll have to see how much of a problem that presents for compatibility going forward, but it already has meant one trip to our system info just to make certain-sure which version we were running.

The hide-away system tray is surprisingly non-cluttered, with a reasonable collection of icons corresponding to major bits of hardware and their respective vendors: ATI for video card settings, Synaptics for the trackpad, IDT for audio, Intel for integrated graphics, and the (angry) Norton, WiFi and Bluetooth icons. With those all tucked away in the fly-out tray for hidden icons, there's just a "solve PC issues" flag (due to our lack of anti-virus), battery indicator, WiFi indicator and volume indicator in the main bar.

As for that video card and overall performance, we're plenty pleased. The laptops ran some near current-gen games like The Witcher and Quake Wars with passable frame rates at reduced graphics settings -- more than we can say for most of the competition at this form factor. It also is a big help with Blu-ray. Using integrated graphics we were able to play a disc, but it took a painful 55 or so seconds to get to any video, whereas with discrete graphics on we got to the good stuff in about 33 seconds. HP has included a DVD / Blu-ray playback app that fits in nicely with its MediaSmart lineup, which is a nice touch, though it does disable Windows 7 Aero when playing aBlu-ray. The HDMI plug makes the Blu-ray playback doubleplusnice, and we're glad HP didn't go the currently trendy route of DisplayPort for a media-savvy laptop such as this. The included HDMI to VGA display adapter, however, is a bit of a head scratcher. Most people we know willing to drop $1,700 on a thin-and-light have a DVI-capable monitor, and we actually couldn't find a VGA cable within arm's reach the last time we checked, making the archaic plug format officially dead to us.

Wrap-up

Overall we're very conflicted about the Envy 13. Hardware wise it's one of our favorite laptops ever, but the trackpad almost destroys all of that good will built up by the other elements -- no matter how great a laptop is, if it's painful to interact with on the go (without an external mouse), what's the point? We also have to say that Windows 7 doesn't make this laptop crazy delicious in any particular manner. It's certainly a better OS than Vista, but it's not so much better to make it a huge selling point in our book or a lure for folks who don't normally walk the Windows path, since many of the traditional pitfalls are still present. All we can say in summary is that we hope HP manages to update the trackpad drivers very, very soon, and that other PC manufacturers steal a bit from HP's and / or Apple's in other respects, since it seems to be working.

[peetuhr Posted Oct 6th 2009 6:04PM]

Last i checked i was never exausted from typing, and for the extra spring you get im willing to give my fingers a bit of a work out.

[rivengle Posted Oct 5th 2009 6:16PM]

When's the last time you've seen a multi touch trackpad on a PC LAPTOP, and not made by lenovo or a netbook.

[EI8HT Posted Oct 5th 2009 6:50PM]

@ rkls

safari is an application, not an os...if you don't like it, don't use it. i never said that os x was perfect, i just said it kicked vistas ass. and if you want to compare os web browsers, don't even get me started on explorer.

[etslee Posted Oct 5th 2009 7:00PM]

I thought it was a designer fragrance.

[Eriq Posted Oct 5th 2009 7:30PM]

"...it just takes a steady hand and a little bit of luck." I LOL'd out loud. HP's are actually my preferred brand, but the crap that most manufacturers pre-install on systems is down right mean. Why do they install their own wireless utilities, when it's built into Windows? And the various "PC Help" utilities that make absolutely no difference. And why make it so that you're forced to install Norton first, before being able to uninstall. A PC tech could figure this one out, but the average user would go mad if they didn't wanna use Norton. And unnecessary extra IE toolbars are silly. Why can't they just keep it minimal and simple, and use the built in search bar that IE provides?

Sony is the worst offender of this kind of crap, followed by Toshiba (they are a close tie, actually), and HP. Acer, too.

If a manufacturer "gets it right" soon, they will be very successful.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 5th 2009 7:37PM]

Wow, would like one of those

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 5th 2009 8:41PM]

Please, guys, come on, you must be kidding with your clumsy and clunky toys, Apple MBP-13 versus this pathetic, outdated clone by HP (a Xerox company?). Just look around you, for some time, broaden your horizons a bit further than the Californian shores!

All laptop connoisseurs and road warriors around the globe will definitely agree: there is only one 13-inch King to rule them all in the luxury segment and, sorry guys but it comes once again from Japan. I mean, of course, the SONY Vaio Z series!

Its lord Vaio VGN-Z, released a year ago, not just now (time to wake up HP!), will bring them all and in the darkness bind them all. Just judge by yourself:
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-> It is not made out of aluminium nor magnesium. Far too ordinary and "déjà vu". No! The "Z" has been tailored as a pure carbon fiber black diamond, you know, the same ultra-strong, ultra-costly material you find in Formula One racing or on the Audi R8...
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-> Its gorgeous screen is of course LED backlit and did not wait for all the noise surrounding the Envy-13 to sport a magnificent 1600x900-pixel resolution, on par with the HP. And you may have heard that Sony is not exactly HP when it comes to premium displays and complex video signal tuning...
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-> The "Z" weights only 3.3 pounds (!), yes you heard well, not 3.8 pounds (Envy-13 naked), not 5.2 pounds (Envy with "slice battery"), not to speak of the 4.4 pounds of the shoulder-killer MBP-13 (rather heavy metal than air, this time ;)... and it goes even further by making the achievement to integrate a full-fledged BluRay burner inside its case for no more than 3.3 pounds(!!). Asians know how to make it slim, you know, when you, guys in the US, have the serious tendency to always keep it beefy. You also all know that Sony invented and patented the BluRay technology, so you are sure that the job is done when the Z" plays your favorite 1080p movies on its gorgeous display.
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-> Of course, it boasts the same switchable graphics as the Envy (called by Sony "hybrid graphic system"). Sorry but do not ask the Apple one to be so "Pro" as to do the same (you have to reboot the whole system if you want the graphic power!!)
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-> When it comes to design, please allow me to prefer the classy and "zen" minimalism of the Sony to the industrial design of the MBP-13, almost the same for years and as elegant to my eyes as a cooking hob, not to speak of the big floral dotted pattern coating the HP Envy palmrest, as if Steve Jobs had been forced to marry Lady Gaga (Please tell me: why on earth did HP splash big flowers onto their Mac clone? To make it look less "Mac-clone" or to turn it "Mac-clown"?). And, once and for all, the keyboard with isolated keys (called "island layout") was not invented by Apple but copied by them from the Sony Vaio X505 masterpiece (the thinnest subnotebook of all times, 3 years before the Air!)
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-> Did I say that the VGN-Z also delivers enough power to leave its 2 US rivals in the dust? Here in Europe, on the sony style store, it can be configured with a 3.06-Ghz Core 2 Duo processor and 8 MB of DDR3 Ram. Not too bad, don't you think, for a subnotebook? Ultra-power in an ultra-light package, the best of two worlds...
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-> Should I add that its drive is of course a 256-GB SSD and that it also comes with a HDSDPA/UMTS(3G) wireless connection chip with an integrated antenna (which neither the Apple - buy an iPhone or die! - nor the HP Envy have...)?
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-> Last but not least, if Apple is convinced to be "cool" because all the fashion design interns & so seem to come to earth pre-equipped with this brand, if HP with the Envy tries to be as "cool" at a cheaper level, well... the Vaio Z is just, ** inspiring **, because you know that, from Singapore to London, the top executives who count will have it on their sides in the most prestigious board rooms, that
the best artists, the most demanding engineers, the most gifted architects around the globe will use it as their favorite brain extensions & digital companions to accomplish their work on the go.
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-> Of course the Vaio price tag is absolutely crazy, making both the MBP-13 and the HP look like One-Laptop-Per-Child avatars (so let me laugh when you write about "luxury" segment, they are definitely not boxing in the same category), but, tell me, who cares when technological craftmanshift is so close to Art!
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(the only thing I "envy" about the MBP-13 is its illuminated keyboard. Please, Sony, if you read this, do not be so stubborn! Make us a led-illuminated keyboard with a light sensor and multiple color schemes similarly to what Alienware did for its gaming notebooks. Yes you can do it... at last! After all, even a 10-$ Sony Ericsson phone for teen-girls sports an illuminated keyboard...)
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Post Scriptum: ... I did not mention the perfect, micro-dotted surface of the touchpad of the VGN-Z which makes the gliding experience pure pleasure, with style & razor-sharp precision! So unfortunate for HP LOL!

[SDreamer Posted Oct 6th 2009 1:15AM]

They should have thrown in a touch screen option, that would rock it then as an option that is.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 6th 2009 1:32AM]

looks like a total Macbook reincarnation..

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 6th 2009 4:30AM]

Look just like a MBP....

[bravadomizzou Posted Oct 7th 2009 9:09AM]

WOW, looks like a cheap knock off of a macbook pro...

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 14th 2009 6:42PM]

Wat a total ripoff of the macbook pro. Why not just get a macbook pro for like the same price and it works even better at that. Its sad that companies are just trying to copy apple. I mean -- sure there is a time when extremists go over board by saying the PC World is Copying the Apple World (Even if it can be slightly true), but honestly, why can't this company just come up with their own idea. I agree on a number of people here, if not for the hefty price tag - it might be worth it, but seriously all they did was add a line onto the trackpad. Even I could think of a better design then this.

On a side note I find it somewhat ironic at how there is a dock on it to. You know someone is copying when they take the same keyboard color, trackpad, dock and overall laptop look as a different one on the market, and label it virtually the same price.. Im actually really disappointed.. Im not a PC or Mac enthusiast, Im kinda on the side, I like both for different reasons. If you're looking for efficiency, speed and things that are sexy - get a mac. If u wanna game then i guess get a PC. I just put XP on my mac for FC2, cause i really only game on PS3, Wii (rarely) or X360.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 26th 2009 12:47PM]

Where can i buy a laptop model Hp mini-110-1030 CA Net book.And how much is the prize?