Product Reviews

Keeping at the forefront of fashion is an expensive lark, and never more so than when trends and technology collide. If a laptop looks stylish and has a good specification too, you can generally expect the next feature in the list to be an eye-watering price tag.

It's always nice when a manufacturer dares to buck the trend. The DV6623EA may not be glamorously named, but for a laptop costing only a tad over 600 quid, its looks are surprisingly refined. Black glossy lids were the must-have for any laptop in 2007, but HP's Imprint finish, which we've seen on previous Pavilions, adds its own twist: get up close and a subtle print of silvery lines emerges, reminiscent of Maori tattoos. It doesn't make Windows go any faster, but it certainly looks good.

Stop gawping at the lid for long enough to open the laptop, and you're welcomed by an equally attractive two-tone interior. The traditional black keyboard contrasts prettily with the glossy silver surround, and even the silver grille covering the surprisingly able Altec Lansing speakers adds to the stylish overall effect.

Refreshingly, these good looks are matched by eminently practical touches. Take, for example, the row of glowing blue shortcut buttons along the keyboards top edge. They look cool, of course, but they also allow you to quickly pause or skip through music tracks, as well as muting the speakers or adjusting the volume. And even if the laptop is just out of reach, you can always use the slim remote control to control

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the playback of DVDs, CDs or your MP3 collection. Neatly, you can stow away the tiny remote in the ExpressCard slot when you're not using it. The keyboard is far from the usual budget disappointment, too. Its traditional layout and full-sized keys mean you'll have no trouble getting up to a nippy typing speed, and while the keys don't have quite as much travel as we'd like, they're still comfy enough for typing long into the night.

Deceptively spacious

One thing that does gives away the HP's modest price is the presence of an AMD rather than an Intel processor. The Athlon X2 TL-58 is still a dual-core model, though, and despite lagging behind Intel's superior Core 2 Duo chips, it achieved an acceptable 116% in our application (2D) benchmarks. Apart from this slight disappointment, there's little to criticise in the rest of the DV6623EA's specifications. 2GB of RAM is a wise choice, helping to keep the memory-hungry Vista Home Premium working far more smoothly than with a single gigabyte. There's no lack of storage, either, thanks to a 250GB hard drive and a DVD writer that supports LightScribe labelling.

We did think the display could have been better. The 15.4 inch screen provides fine image quality, with punchy colours, but its slight lack of brightness leaves whites looking slightly grey. Vertical viewing angles are also a touch narrow, which occasionally left us tilting the screen back and forth to find a sweet spot between too dark and too washed-out. And while the glossy finish is partly responsible for the vivid, high-contrast image, it's also rather prone to distracting reflections under bright light.

Overlook these mild complaints, which is easy to do given the reasonable price, and the Pavilion DV6623EA looks like a fine budget laptop. The AMD processor lacks a little poke, but the nVidia graphics will cope with a little mild gaming, and the all-round specification more than makes up for some compromises on raw power. If you want a good-looking laptop that's a pleasure to use, it's good to know it needn't cost a packet.