HP Envy 13
High-end looks and feel without the matching price tag, and with Nvidia graphics as a handy extra
SCORE PRICE £708 (£849 inc VAT) from store.hp.com
The HP Spectre 15 is a stunning premium laptop, but not everyone can afford to spend that kind of money. That’s where the HP Envy 13 enters the scene, giving you a taste of the high-end at a more accessible price. You might not get the fastest processor around or even the latest, greatest screen technology – although a high-end version with a Core i7 processor is available – but you do get a superb and slimline design, consistently good quality, richer audio than usual and more than enough performance for mainstream applications.
In some ways, we prefer the Envy’s looks to those of the Spectre. It’s sleek, silver and very slim, just 14.9mm thick and 1.3kg in weight, with a tiny bezel around three sides of the screen. On first impressions it looks like a unibody design, but you can find the seams if you look hard enough. HP has done a nice job of smoothing out the angles, and the Envy feels very comfortable on the lap. The pattern on the Bang & Olufsen-branded speaker grille looks great as well.
Things get slightly confusing on the side of the unit, however. Look on the left-hand-side and you’ll see USB 3.1, USB-C ports and a microSD card slot, along with an audio socket in the corner where you would normally expect the power socket to go. This – a proprietary effort, we’re afraid – can be found on the righthand side, along with a further USB 3.1 port and a fingerprint reader. The latter works brilliantly when you work out where it is, but it’s not the easiest place to find if you’re in a hurry. We also found its tiny surface area makes the initial setup a bit of an ordeal.
This isn’t a convertible model, but it does come with a touchscreen that works flawlessly. The same can also be said for the smooth, glass-like touchpad with its responsive integrated buttons. Perhaps our favourite thing, though, is the keyboard. It has a spacious layout and a light-but-fast action, with enough weight and spring in each key that you can feel you’re typing.
The screen is arguably the Envy 13’s weakest point, but only by the high standards of other laptops in this test. Peak brightness is just 312cd/m2 and it only hits 83% of the sRGB gamut, which are actually slightly better results than the sample we tested last month ( see issue 288, p61). Overall, colour accuracy is average. Don’t get us wrong – it’s still a great laptop for a movie on the way home from a day out of the office – but put it up against the Dell XPS or HP Spectre and it will appear dull.
Otherwise, we’re not quite so enthralled with the Envy’s battery life: seven-and-a-half hours of looping video playback isn’t terrible, but it still puts the HP well behind the leaders this month.
There are no such problems with the audio; it’s rich for a laptop of this size, with some effective spatial trickery that makes the soundstage
“The Envy feels as luxurious as laptops costing £1,500 or more, yet you can splash out £1,000 and still get £150 of change”
wider than the speakers. It’s a little compressed and congested for music, but it’s better than the thin-and-light laptop norm.
Now we come to performance. Our test sample this month came with a Core i5-8250U processor, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and GeForce MX150 graphics. That’s a decent specification for mainstream applications and resulted in a correspondingly decent result in our benchmarks. Find another £250 down the back of the sofa, though, and you’re rewarded with a Core i78550U, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. That’s a very tempting option indeed.
If you don’t need that kind of power, however, then this basic model is amazing value. The Envy 13 feels as luxurious as laptops costing £1,500 or more, yet you can splash out £1,000 and still get £150 of change. Of course, even at £850, you can still find laptops that are faster or have a better screen – but as an all-round sub-£1,000 ultraportable, the HP Envy 13 is hard to beat.