HP Envy 13
Lucky for some
The Envy 13 follows a familiar pattern of recent HP laptop designs – an angular body, a slightly raised palm rest and engraved detailing on the lid. It has a silver finish that looks and feels very upmarket. At 1.3kg, it isn’t the lightest laptop we’ve ever reviewed, but it does feel reassuringly robust and the lid is very rigid. Measuring 17x306x194mm (HXWXD), it’s a small laptop that will easily slide into a backpack.
Solid design, a decent screen, and graphics that can take on most games
One casualty of its compact dimensions is the Enter key, which is wide but the same height as a standard key. We prefer Enter keys to be double-height so that it’s easy to hit without requiring precise keyboard skills. Another gripe is that the power button is next to the Delete key, making it very easy to hit by mistake.
However, the keys are virtually silent when typing, and feel comfortable to use. Likewise, the 110x60mm touchpad, although plastic, is pretty faultless and very responsive. There’s also a keyboard backlight (for those who like to type in the dark) and a dedicated button to use the decent 720p webcam. Another dedicated key opens the HP System Control app, which lets you put the Envy into one of its power modes, which can help you manage your battery life.
Connectivity is well catered for, with a drop-jaw USB 3.0 port on each side, as well as a USB-C port on the left (all pictured below). The USB-C port supports Displayport 1.4 output, which is just as well as there’s no HDMI port.
Because it has a gloss finish, the Envy’s 13.3in Full HD (1920x1080-pixel) 60Hz IPS screen can be difficult to view in direct sunlight, but otherwise it’s perfectly fine. It’s bright (up to 419cd/ m² ) and excels at reproducing colours, which makes watching films a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
This is helped by the surprisingly high quality of the built-in Bang & Olufsen speakers. There isn’t a great deal of bass but they’re well balanced and, unusually for a laptop this size, make a decent stab of outputting music that doesn’t sound tinny.
Also unusual in a small laptop is the standalone graphics hardware, based around the Nvidia Geforce MX450 graphics card. This has less power than the version you might find in a desktop PC, and it only has 2GB of dedicated video memory, but it adds more graphical power than you’d otherwise get from the Intel Core-i5 1135G7 quad-core processor.
As a result, it ran smoothly with respectable frame rates (40fps) when we tested it with several demanding games, albeit with many of the highest detail settings switched off. However, in a laptop of this size and price, it’s unusual to have any gaming capability at all.
Battery life lasted 11 hours 21 minutes in our video-playback test, which is reasonable but falls well short of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7’s impressive 15 hours 40 minutes (see Alternative, below).
Overall, this is an impressive laptop, particularly for those looking for a smallscreen compact model that’s powerful enough to run a few games and is good for streaming entertainment. We’d still recommend the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 over this for general use, as it has a larger screen and better Windows performance, but the HP Envy 13 is a solid option for those more focused on entertainment.
SPECIFICATIONS
Four-core Intel Core i5-1135g7 processor • 8GB of memory • Nvidia Geforce MX450 graphics • 13.3in 1920x1080-pixel IPS display • 512GB SSD • 720p webcam • Wi-fi 6 • Bluetooth 5 • 1x USB-C port • 2x USB 3.0 ports • Microsd card slot • Windows 10 Home • 17x307x195mm (HXWXD) • 1.3kg • One-year warranty www.snipca.com/39177
VERDICT A compact, affordable and powerful laptop, with a surprising amount of graphics power for such a small device ★★★★★
ALTERNATIVE Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 £749 This Amd-powered alternative runs Windowsowsws faster, but isn’t as ggood for gaming andd other graphics-basedaseda tasks