There’s no mistaking the HP Envy 13. One glance and you know it’s an upscale piece of electronics. It looks and feels like an expensive status symbol, with a very slick, very modern design. Beyond the facade, though, it is a very good piece of hardware, with features and performance that serve to impress.
Clad in an aluminum and magnesium chassis bearing a number of visual details, there’s no mistaking that it’s a premium machine. It features a beautiful edge-to-edge glass over the screen, to go along with the large touchpad and attractive keyboard layout. Surprisingly, it’s pretty heavy for how it looks.
Hardware suite consists of a 2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 graphics, 3GB of DDR2 RAM and a 250GB HDD. It’s a decent set, made even better by the Windows 7 pre-installed on the machine.
The 13.3-inch widescreen LED display manages a native 1,600×900 resolution and is easily one of the notebook’s highlights. It offers great colors, sharp images and excellent viewing angles. The keyboard is well made, with full-size Backspace, Tab and Shift buttons, making for very easy typing. While I appreciate the touchpad’s size, some of the multi-touch gestures are confounding and requires a bit of a learning curve. Audio performance is excellent here, better even than most machines in the same high-end category.
System performance is great, striking a great balance between processing power and energy use. This leaves the thin-and-light laptops in the dark, while managing to match (and, in some instances, surpass) the performance of the 13-inch MacBook Pro. Launching multiple programs and running games (thanks to the combo integrated and discrete graphics) wasn’t a problem at all.
Additional features include two USB ports (yep, only two), HDMI out, stereo speakers, an SD card reader and the usual networking set (no WWAN, though). Honestly, I’m surprised there aren’t more, since this isn’t a thin-and-light. It ships with an external Blu-ray burner.
Overall, the upscale HP Envy 13 is an interesting machine. However, the pricing, which is more at par with thin-panel laptops like the MacBook Air, makes it a tough purchase, especially considering that it’s more comparable to the cheaper 13-inch MacBook Pro.
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