In a previous life, the HP Envy
14 was a laptop's laptop: a 5.69-pound slugger with an optical drive, discrete
AMD graphics and a battery that couldn't last four hours in our battery rundown
test. The new Envy 14, dubbed the Spectre, has shed almost two pounds, along
with its discrete graphics and outmoded optical drive. Premium design touches,
thumping Beats Audio with a volume control wheel, and HP's brilliant Radiance
display make the ENVY 15 notebook stand out in the 15-inch field. Other
features like HP CoolSense technology, Intel Wireless Display (WiDi), and a
backlit keyboard make this an excellent choice for a wide array of work and
play options.
If stylish looks, premium
features, and topflight performance are on your list of PC needs, the HP ENVY
15 won't disappoint. There's no doubt about it: the Spectre is a premium
machine, and it's not just that HP needed something high-end to take the place
of the last-gen Envy 14. This also happens to be the company's first
consumer-grade Ultrabook, and it arrives at a time when there are many to
choose from. Enter HP's marketing department: the outfit's touting this thing
as a "premium Ultrabook" -- the kind of machine you'd choose if you
wanted a 1600 x 900 IPS-quality display or an unorthodox design. In a previous
life, the HP Envy 14 was a laptop's laptop: a 5.69-pound slugger with an
optical drive, discrete AMD graphics and a battery that couldn't last four
hours in our battery rundown test. The new Envy 14, dubbed the Spectre, has
shed almost two pounds, along with its discrete graphics and outmoded optical
drive. There's no doubt about it: the Spectre is a premium machine, and it's
not just that HP needed something high-end to take the place of the last-gen
Envy 14. Enter HP's marketing department: the outfit's touting this thing as a
"premium Ultrabook" -- the kind of machine you'd choose if you wanted
a 1600 x 900 IPS-quality display or an unorthodox design. Though the Spectre
clearly shares some genes with the new Envy 15 and 17, it's obvious HP chose
this machine as a guinea pig for some bolder design choices. For starters, the
PC is swaddled in Gorilla Glass. You heard right: glass. That includes
that flat fingerprint magnet of a lid, along with a thick shield stretching
across the palm rest, creating a plateau below the keyboard. A corny analogy? In
a recent conversation, product managers who shepherded the laptop through the
development process told us they particularly wanted to reinforce the palm
rest, that part of the laptop constantly getting scuffed up by watches,
bracelets and those pesky high school class rings. Why glass, though? It's
lightweight and tough, stays cool to the touch and plays nice with the NFC
radio.
What HP's claiming, essentially,
is that contrary to whatever you might have guessed, the glass actually makes
the laptop less fragile, not more so. The glass-coated bits don't feel
rugged, per se, but definitely resilient. The laptop's durability? You may also
notice the Spectre's mag-alloy body has a slicker feel than the Envy 15. If
you've been wondering why you should choose this over HP's budget Ultrabook,
the Folio 13, you're looking at most of the reasons right here.
The Spectre has an NFC radio
built into the left side of the palm rest, but you wouldn't know it from
reading HP's website: the laptop's product page makes no mention of this
feature. It's also to best to search for "HP Touch to Share," since
"touch to share" yields lots of irrelevant results. Once you download the app and
make sure NFC and Android Beam are enabled, open the Touch to Share program
installed on your PC. As you're doing this, make sure you place the
phone length-wise across the palm rest, parallel to the keyboard. Thereafter,
you can just run that mobile Touch to Share app in the background on your phone
when you want to share pages. With the Envy 15, HP didn't skimp on the cushy
keys, and we're happy to report it's more of the same in this shrunken-down
model. In the grand scheme of things, with so many Ultrabooks rocking shallow
keyboards, the Spectre offers one of the better typing experiences we've
enjoyed on a laptop this size, though you'll still find equally tactile keys on
the Folio 13, Dell XPS 13 and MacBook Air.
You'll notice there's a good deal
of similarity between this keyboard and the Folio 13's, whose arrow keys leave
more room for the left / right keys than the up / down ones. As with the other
Envy laptops, HP stuck an LED underneath each keycap -- a design choice
intended to enhance the glow and also reduce light leakage from beneath the
keys. Double-take, gape, gawk, ogle,
ooh and ahh: That's what we did when first seeing the HP Envy 17 (2012)'s
($1,484.99 direct) screen. The Envy 17 complements its vivid visuals with
awesome Beats Audio, thanks to a six-speakers-plus-subwoofer setup highlighted
by a good old-fashioned volume dial.
Design
Except for a black rather than
silver lid (with light-up HP logo), the Envy 17 resembles the Apple MacBook Pro
17-inch ($2,499 list)—a bulky (10.7 by 16.4 by 1.3 inches) aluminum slab with
black chiclet-style keyboard and a slot-loading optical drive. The Envy 17's
wireless repertoire includes Bluetooth and 802.11n Wi-Fi, both of which worked
smoothly in our tests, plus a pair of multimedia streaming choices: Intel
Wireless Display (the latest WiDi 2.1, with protected DVD/Blu-ray content,
1080p, and surround-sound support) sends the laptop's video and audio to an
HDTV set equipped with a Belkin or Netgear adapter, while HP Wireless Audio
promises to stream the Envy's sound to KleerNet-compatible wireless speakers or
headphones at distances up to 100 feet.
While our test unit was configured with a single
750GB, 7,200-rpm Western Digital hard drive, the Envy 17 can be ordered with a
variety of mass storage options featuring single or dual hard disks; the top of
the line is two 1TB spinning drives plus a 128GB solid-state drive. Dual
graphics adapters are standard, with the Intel HD Graphics 3000 chipset built
into the processor used when the HP is running on battery power and a 1GB AMD
Radeon HD 7690M XT taking over when the system's plugged into AC power.
Performance
Like the HP dv7-6163cl and Toshiba Satellite P775-S7320 ($849.99 at Best Buy, 3.5 stars), the Envy 17 is built around Intel's Core i7-2670QM, a quad-core, eight-thread processor that runs at 2.2GHz. The Envy 17 and HP dv7-6163cl raced to a tie in our Handbrake video and Photoshop CS5 image-editing tests, both with times of 1 minute 30 seconds and 3:37, respectively. It slipped behind the HP dv7-6163cl at native or full-screen resolution, however, with its score of 7,598 trailing the 8,847 the dv7-6163cl received—probably because the HP system's native resolution was a lower 1,600-by-900 rather than 1,920-by-1,080. Like desktop replacements, media center laptops rarely stray from their wall outlets, but you never know when any laptop may be called upon to hit the road. Media center laptops form an elite or premium category—we won't deny that the HP Envy 17 is pricey at $1,484.99, although it's more than a thousand dollars under Apple's MacBook Pro 17-inch.
Like the HP dv7-6163cl and Toshiba Satellite P775-S7320 ($849.99 at Best Buy, 3.5 stars), the Envy 17 is built around Intel's Core i7-2670QM, a quad-core, eight-thread processor that runs at 2.2GHz. The Envy 17 and HP dv7-6163cl raced to a tie in our Handbrake video and Photoshop CS5 image-editing tests, both with times of 1 minute 30 seconds and 3:37, respectively. It slipped behind the HP dv7-6163cl at native or full-screen resolution, however, with its score of 7,598 trailing the 8,847 the dv7-6163cl received—probably because the HP system's native resolution was a lower 1,600-by-900 rather than 1,920-by-1,080. Like desktop replacements, media center laptops rarely stray from their wall outlets, but you never know when any laptop may be called upon to hit the road. Media center laptops form an elite or premium category—we won't deny that the HP Envy 17 is pricey at $1,484.99, although it's more than a thousand dollars under Apple's MacBook Pro 17-inch.