HP Envy 14 (1110NR) review

specs | design | performance | in the box | conclusion

Quick specs

• Intel Core i5 460M 2.53GHz
• 2x2GB DDR3 RAM @ 667MHz
• 2.5" 7200RPM 640GB Samsung SATA HDD
• ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 w/ 1GB RAM and Intel GMA HD Graphics
• 14.5" 16:9 LED (HP Brightview Infinity) screen (1366x768) w/ webcam and stereo mic
• Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6200 802.11 AGN wifi + bluetooth
• Super Multi 8X DVD+-R/RW w/Double Layer
• 8-cell 3760MAh 59Wh battery
• Weight 5.4lb (2.44kg)

Details

Design
This is arguably the best looking consumer HP laptop right now. The minimalistic approach, the simple design and the quality materials make it stand out. It's got an all over aluminum body that feels well built (except the battery cover, see below).

Ports and layout:
Like most laptops in a while this one has all the ports on the sides.

On the right side we have: USB/e-SATA port, HDMI, mini DisplayPort, kensington lock, network and AC. It's worth noting that the power and drive activity lights are also on this side. They're out of direct sight.

On the left side we have: slot-loading optical drive, 2 USBs, headphone/mic jack, headphone jack.

The speakers are located in the front of the laptop. They provide mediocre sound with very little bass. I was expecting more from the "beatsaudio" edition of this laptop. Turns out what it does is allow you to "hear what the artist hear" if you buy a pair of beats headphones. I'd much rather have better speakers, than this gimmick that makes you buy special headphones. Also in the front right corner of the laptop there's a SD/MMC card reader.

Display
This laptop has a 14.5" LED (HP Brightview Infinity) edge-to-edge glossy screen, 16:9 aspect ratio and a resolution of 1366x768. I feel this is not enough and that 1600x900 would look much better. On top it has a webcam with great video quality and 2 microphones. The horizontal viewing angels are ok while the vertical ones are mediocre. Also, being glossy you can use it as a mirror when dark surfaces are displayed so it can be challenging to view outdoors.

This is how bright the screen is compared to a Dell XPS-1645 (on the left) that has a RGBLED display, both on maximum brightness:

Keyboard and touchpad:

The touchpad, even tho it's big and matte, is not good. Its major flaw is that it does not separate the "buttons" from the touchpad area. It's all one big touch-sensitive surface with the bottom part also playing the role of the buttons. If you have a finger on the touchpad and try to click a mouse "button" with another finger, the cursor jumps to the bottom of the screen. You have to take your firs finger off, click the mouse button, then resume moving the cursor. Also the entire area of the touchpad pushes in when you perform a "button" click which can be a little distracting too. Tapping twice on the white dot in the upper left corner will disable the touchpad completely, presumably for gaming or when you're using an external mouse.

The chiclet style back-light keyboard feels solid and does not bend or twist when typing. One strange thing i noticed is that the Ctrl key seems to play the role of the Fn button, and the Fn button needs to be pressed when you want to hit any F-keys. Changing the screen brightness, for example, is done by pressing Ctrl-F2/Ctrl-F3 (instead of Fn-F2/Fn-F3) but if you want to press Alt-F4 you have to do Fn-Alt-F4. This is how the backlight looks in the dark:

Battery and AC adapter:

The laptop came with a 8-cell 3760MAh 59Wh battery. It comes pre-installed and is located completely within the laptop's chassis, under a cover panel. Also located here is the hard drive, so no need to unscrew anything else to replace it. The cover itself feels a little flimsy when on as it does not fit tightly enough and can wiggle a bit when you pick up the laptop. This definitely detracts from an otherwise solid build quality.

The power adapter is not too big.

Performance

An interesting aspect of this laptop is that it has two videocards. By default, if you're on AC it uses the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650, but if you're on battery power it switches to the Intel HD. I wonder how inefficient the ATI videocard is at saving power if HP choose to have a second one in there :)

On the software side you get windows 7 home premium 64-bit. It boots from power-on to login screen in 51 sec. Shut down takes 11 seconds from clicking the button to power-off. Going to sleep takes 6 seconds and waking up - 4 seconds. The OS and all the bundled software take about 35gigs and the recovery partition is 25gigs.

Windows experience index:

On AC power in "High Performance" profile - 5.9

Super PI for 1mil and 8mil (on AC power):

 CrystalDiskMark:

PCMark05:
On AC power with ATI videocard in "High Performance" profile - 8008
On battery power with ATI videocard in High Performance" profile - 8055
On battery power with Intel videocard in "Power Saving" profile - 5505 (about 46% slower)

3DMark06:

 

On AC power with ATI videocard in "High Performance Mode" - 6949

 

 On battery power with ATI videocard in "High Performance Mode" - 6948

On battery power with Intel videocard in "High Performance Mode" - 1975 (251% slower)

Wi-fi speed (on AC power):
Tested on Asus RT-N16 b/g/n wireless router at a distance of 5 feet (2 meters).

 On 802.11g it averages to 1.8MB/s - aprox. 30% link utilization

On 802.11n it connects at 144Mbps and averages to 6.6MB/s - aprox. 45% link utilization

 

What's in the box

AC adapter, manuals, 2gb sd card, cloth pouch.

Pros
- good specs
- back-light keyboard
- slot loading optical drive (on the left side too)
- aluminum case
- great build quality

Cons
- crap beats speakers (no bass at all)
- low resolution (1366x768) glossy screen
- horrible touchpad
- flimsy battery cover

Conclusion
This laptop has had the potential to become HP's best yet, with its beautiful design, great aluminum body and good specs. Unfortunately it's being held back by the low screen resolution and the terrible touchpad. The flimsy battery cover also detracts from the otherwise really well build chassis. So close guys, but no cigar. At least not yet.

Fujitsu U820 review

specs | design | performance | in the box | conclusion

Quick specs

• Intel Atom Z530 1.6GHz
• 1x1GB RAM DDR2 @ 533MHz
• 1.8" 60GB HDD
• Intel GMA 500 videocard
• 5.6" 8:5 aspect touch-screen (1280x800) w/ 0.3MP webcam and fingerprint scanner
• 802.11 BGN wifi + bluetooth + gps
• 4-cell 5200mAh battery
• Weight 1.32lb (0.6kg)

Details

Design
This is certainly a unique device and most design decisions come from the need to accomodate such a small form factor. It's well built and  feels sturdy in your hand.

Ports and layout:
Because of the small size the laptop has a limited number of ports, all of them located on the sides. Obviously there is no optical drive.

On the right side we have: wireless/bluetooth switch, CF card slot, spring loaded power switch, AC
On the left side we have: mic, headphone, SD card slot, USB, kensington lock and volume control.

There is no network or VGA port on the laptop itself, instead it comes with a dongle that you connect in the front (in the port replicator). The stylus is housed in the screen bezel and slides up from the upper right corner.

The speaker is located above the keyboard on the left side next to the "mouse" buttons and provide medium sound quality. They're not very loud.

This model also has built in GPS. The navigation software offered is Garmin Mobile PC and has turn by turn directions. The usefulness of the GPS is questionable since the speakers aren't loud enough to be heard when driving around.

Display:
The laptop has a 5.6" LED glossy resistive touch-screen, with an uncommon 8:5 aspect ratio and a resolution of 1280x800. This resolution is too big for an 5.6" screen so things look a little small. Increasing the DPI to at least 125% solves the problem in windows (still not all applications are aware of this setting) but not when browsing the web. You will have to zoom in on most websites as the text initially is very hard to read. Above the screen there's a webcam with good video quality. Below the screen there are three special buttons - Zoom, Keyboard Light On/Off and Screen orientation toggle. In the lower right corner, there's an Alt button and the fingerprint scanner (used instead a password for logins). All these are there to facilitate when using the laptop in tablet mode and all work as expected. The screen looks bright and colorful offering medium horizontal and vertical viewing angles and being glossy you can use it as a mirror when dark surfaces are displayed.

Keyboard and touchpad:

This laptop does not have a touchpad. Instead it's got a pointing stick on the right side above the keyboard and two mouse buttons on the left side above the keyboard. To the left of the pointing stick there's 3 programmable buttons - Fn, Up and Down. The pointing stick can be frustrating at times and takes some getting used to. Luckily there's always the touchscreen.

The keyboard is quite small but given the form factor it's understandable. Some things aren't where you'd expect them to be and some keys are double mapped. Half of the function keys, the page-up/page-down/home/end/backslash keys and a few others require you to hold down the Fn key. The designers still managed to have a wide Enter and Space bar, but even so the layout takes some getting used to. The keyboard itself has got a solid fee with no flexing or bending of any kind.

Battery and AC adapter:
The battery this laptop came with was a 4-cell 5200mAh rated for 7.5 hours but a more realistic figure is about 5-6 hours. It does stick out the back but it doubles as a quite comfortable handle when in tablet mode. The AC adapter is small enough to be carried around easily as is the VGA/Network adapter dongle.

Performance
The computer came pre-installed with windows vista 32-bit. It's quite slow so i replaced it with windows 7 home premium 32-bit before i ran any of the benchmarks. It boots from power-on to login screen in 52 sec. Shut down takes 16 secs from clicking the button in the start menu to power-off. Going to sleep takes about 13 seconds and waking up - 5 seconds.

Windows experience index:

On AC power in "High Performance" profile - 2.3

Super PI for 1mil and 8mil (on AC power):

"High Performance" profile

CrystalDiskMark:

PCMark05:
On AC power in "High Performance" profile - 1147
On battery power in "High Performance" profile - 1146

3DMark06:

On AC power in "High Performance" profile - 44

On battery power in "High Performnce" profile - 43

Wi-fi speed (on AC power):

Tested on Asus RT-N16 b/g/n wireless router at a distance of 5 feet (2 meters).

On 802.11g it averages to 2.6MB/s - aprox. 40% link utilization

On 802.11n it averages to 9.5MB/s - aprox. 60% link utilization

Video playback:

Playback of a 720p h264 movie is almost possible out of the box. In a window it's running a bit slow, with skipped frames and some sound artifacts here and there but if full screen there's almost no skipping. It pushes both cores of the CPU to 100% but it's quite watchable.

 CPU usage playing 720p

 

To really get silky smooth playback however you need K-Lite Codec Pack so you can use DirectX Video Acceleration (offload decoding to the videocard). Setting the output to "EVR Custom" and "D3D Fullscreen" in Media Player Classic allowed the video to play smoothly and completely lag-free.

CPU usage playing 720p with DirectX Video Acceleration

Playing a video on Hulu in the browser window was barely watchable skipping a second or two at times even though the CPU usage is not maxed out on both cores. 

CPU usage playing Hulu in a the browser window

Full screen playback is better with less frequent skipping and a higher frame-rate but you can still notice it's not very smooth. It does use the CPU less.

CPU usage playing Hulu in full screen

Youtube 480p videos play ok with no skipping but at a noticeably low frame-rate.

 CPU usage playing 480p Youtube

Finally Youtube 360p videos play nice and smooth.

 CPU usage playing 360p Youtube

Hopefully when Flash starts using the videocard for rendering the CPU usage will drop to more manageable levels and the frame-rates will increase.

Compared to Sony VAIO P

What's in the box
Battery, AC adapter, power cord, VGA/network dongle, GPS antena, spare pointing stick cap, manual.

Pros 
- very small and light
- good build quality
- touchscreen
- fingerprint scanner
- small power adapter
- good battery life

Cons
- high screen resolution, fonts too small at times (1280x800)
- small keyboard

Conclusion
The Fujitsu Lifebook U820 is the successor to the famous Lifebook U810 from a few years ago. The main design has not changed however most of the internal components have been upgraded to specs comparable to those of standard netbooks these days but in a form factor half their size. This device is packed with features and it's got a battery life that will allow you to use it untethered for most of the day. The small screen/high resolution combination can be a challenge at times as well as the size and layout of the keyboard but compromises must be made when venturing into the realm of ultra-portability. Overall - a very impressive full featured computer.