So, I've had this for a over a week now - so I thought I'd update this with some of my thoughts.
Design & Build
From a distance, and up close - the materials used look and feel a little bland. The plastic is a smooth, semi-gloss plastic which shows fingerprints but doesn't have the lustre of a full gloss finish.
I can’t help but think that a soft-touch plastic material as sported by the Lenovo X121e would have been nicer. The soft-touch rubbery finish as seen on the pre-release models earlier this year seems to have been pulled from production, no idea why this is though as I think it would have finished it off nicely.
The bottom of the laptop has a flat plastic sheet, in the same finish. This is the first laptop I’ve used that has abandoned the age-old tradition of having cutouts for installing or removing some components and the whole panel can be removed once the battery is out. This is great for people like me who like fiddling and having a poke around. Also, what I like about this is that you have a decent amount of access to the heatsink and cooler to clean it of dust etc that tends to build up over time. Also, because of this design there is no intake or exhaust on the bottom - so having it on your lap or a soft surface shouldn’t suffocate it too much - there is only on exhaust vent to the left side which in general use I haven’t found myself covering up and getting it to run hot..
At the top of the back of the keyoard there’s just a power and web access button, the casing of the laptop rises up sligtly, and as a consequence the bottom of the LCD panel curve’s back to accommodate. I guess this is to allow the design of the base to be so sparse. There are to hinges for the screen which are separate to the housing, but they allow the screen to fold all the way back which can be quite useful if you find yourself looking at it from above, or...err...hanging it on a wall? Anyway, I quite like this feature.
There are a set of ‘beats’ stereo speakers at the bottom of the laptop, which is curved up. This means that the speakers (generally speaking) aren’t covered and muffled during normal use.
There’s a usual array of ports on each side, nothing notably missing, and they all seem to be reasonably spread out.
Overall the build quality and materials are good, and it doesn’t feel cheap if a little bland.
Keyboard & Trackpad
Both the keyboard and trackpad are well sized for a laptop of this size, the keyboard is nice to type on and has a decent layout. It hasn’t really changed much from the older DM1. The system will default to leaving the F keys disabled meaning that the shortcut keys are active all the time. I found this a little annoying at first, but soon found being able to adjust the volume and brightness without an Fn key more useful than having to do so the odd occasion I want to use an F key.
The areas to the left and right of the trackpad has the same finish as the lid and base, whereas the trackpad has a doppled texture which offers a decent enough of tactile feedback and frictionless movement. The size is better than a lot of 12” and 13” laptops I’ve used in the past - although nowhere near as large as the one sported by the MacBook Air and newer Ultrabooks. It looks more usable than the one on the X121e for sure, and was actually something that put me off that laptop.
The 2 mouse buttons are located at the very bottom of the laptop and go all the way to the edge meaning they can be pressed by putting pressure on the corner of the laptop. The 2 buttons are 2 separate buttons, rather than one large button with 2 clickers at each end. They both work well as you would expect, although they’re a little loud and ‘clicky’ for my liking. Generally it’s not really much of an issue though unless you’re fussy like me.
The Synaptics touchpad software installed by default allows 2 finger scrolling, rotating and pinch-zooming. I found I had to tweak the settings quite a bit to get it working how I like - but that’s a personal thing really.
Screen
The screen I feel, is probably the thing I’ve been disappointed by the most. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not terrible and once calibrated and at the correct angle - it looks pretty nice. But the biggest problem for me is the viewing angles, vertical in particular. Colour reproduction and brightness I’m quite content with really, and all things considered it’s probably no worse than any other laptop at this price (£350). I haven’t really played any games on it, so I can’t comment on response times - but I’ve watched a football match on it courtesy of Sky Go which I found more than reasonable.
Performance
I’ll start off with the Windows Experience Index for what it’s worth.
As you can see, the CPU is the lowest score at 3.9, I’d imagine a current generation Core i3 would score in the region of 5-6 meaning on paper there’s a large gap. However in day-to-day use I don’t think it would be massively noticeable. Video playback is compensated by the hardware acceleration offered by the accompanying Radeon GPU. Gaming performance and any CPU intensive encoding work would be be the biggest losers.
I have actually got a Crucial SSD on the way which should go some way to improve the day-to-day performance.
I ran a quick 3DMark06 test, and got a result of 2100, which I thought was a little low. A short while after I uninsured it I realised 2xAA was enabled.
Playing back a 1080p MKV (using DXVA) isn’t an issue at all, with the CPU load at around 15%. Youtube works well at 1080P as does iPlayer at 720P.
Heat & Noise
At it’s most noisy the system is not overly loud, but is distracting in a quite room. With the TV on in the background it’s not very noticeable. The fan generally doesn’t spin up in web browsing or video playback and the left side of the laptop is warm-ish to touch and warmer underneath where the CPU is.
Battery Life
HP state something like 8hours for this - which I think is pushing it a little. I’m getting about 6 hours with brightness at 70% and WiFi on.
I dare say I could get 8hours with WiFi off and brightness low - but I don’t think that’s a fair representation of real world usage. When doing more intensive work such as games or videos - expect the battery life to suffer as a result.
Overall
I’m reasonably pleased with the laptop for the money, I feel the latter part of that point is key there. For £350 it’s a good buy, it offers better than netbook performance (but not quite upto Intel Core CPU standards) and also the ability for some light gaming thanks to the Radeon graphics. Battery life is good, and almost good enough for “all day” browsing, but not quite. You’d certainly get an evening of couch surfing out of it with room to spare.
