// Home / Reviews / Laptops

HP Envy 15 review

in Laptops

1 of 2

Gallery

Verdict

HP's Envy 15 takes on Apple at its own game, but proves sinful in all the wrong ways

Review Date: 20 Nov 2009

Reviewed By: Sasha Muller

Price when reviewed: £1,043 (£1,199 inc VAT)

Overall Rating

Features & Design
3 stars out of 6

Value for Money
3 stars out of 6

Performance
5 stars out of 6

Even here, though, in its most glorious moment, the Envy leaves a sour taste in the mouth. Those performance figures might prove outstanding, but the massive heat output of the powerful CPU and GPU don’t take long to heat the HP’s metallic chassis to uncomfortable levels. Noisy fans spin up while the Envy labours away, but it’s not enough to stop the wristrest and the left-hand side of the keyboard hitting worryingly high temperatures. It might be portable, but we wouldn’t envy anyone working with the HP on their lap.

Not, unfortunately, that you’ll be travelling far with the Envy 15 before it needs recharging. The slimline chassis leaves little in the way of space for a battery, and it shows. Even in our light usage test, the Envy stumbled after just 2hrs 32mins. And if that’s not enough, well, you’ll just have to shell out extra for the optional battery slice and suffer carrying around an extra few hundred grams in your bag.

Even sat at a desk, the HP disappoints. The Scrabble-tile keyboard isn’t bad but, just like so many aspects of the Envy 15, is hamstrung by poor design decisions. The strip of shortcut keys along the keyboard’s left and right hand edges make touch-typing a frustrating affair, and there’s little in the way of feel to any of the square, short-travel keys.

But if the keyboard annoys, the trackpad is enough to elicit pure, unfettered rage. Just like Apple and its novel glass touchpad, HP has integrated the buttons into the multitouch trackpad itself, requiring you to physically click either side of the trackpad. The integrated buttons are exceedingly stiff, however, and pressing them often jogged the cursor away from where we intended to click. And where Apple’s trackpad happily allows you to rest a button-clicking thumb on the bottom left of the pad, and still smoothly control the cursor with another finger, the HP becomes confused, occasionally snapping the cursor to the position of your thumb.

The final disappointment comes courtesy of the Envy 15’s display. Despite brutal amounts of multi-tasking power on tap from the Core i7 processor, the screen’s native resolution of 1,366 x 768 barely leaves enough room to squeeze two documents side by side. And although it's bright, colours just don’t pop off the screen as they should, turning Crysis’ tropical battlefield into a somewhat overcast, dull affair.

Power, looks, portability, battery life, ergonomics; whichever way you cut it, the Envy’s performance is desperately inconsistent. There are flashes of brilliance here and there, but they're so tempered with mediocrity that the Envy 15 becomes impossible to recommend.

Author: Sasha Muller

1 2

Subscribe to PC Pro magazine. We'll give you 3 issues for £1 plus a free gift - click here

From around the web

Comments

User comments

HP LAPTOP Parts

this laptop is too good, fast and feeling good.

Exiting HP laptop battery,laptop fan,laptop adapter released by it-battery.BUY the best HP laptop parts.
http://www.it-battery.com/laptop-ac-adapters-hp-la
ptop-ac-adapters-c-184_107.html

http://www.it-battery.com/hp-laptop-batteries-c-81
.html

By Roynorton on 20 Nov 2009

Guys, play fair.

Your pushing this laptop as if its a gaming desktop, then complain when the graphics card gets toasty. I see some advantages with the graphics card heat feedback, far better than a plastic case that does not radiate off any heat and the user is non the wiser for the heat levels.

All graphics cards will get hot when running Crysis on high settings. Especially laptops as they have tiny cooling fans.

No pleasing some.

This laptop is a huge spec upgrade over a MacBookPro .

By Tibbs on 20 Nov 2009

Macbooks run hot too.

Are you even going to show us some benchmarks or just comment on the aesthetics?

By windywoo on 21 Nov 2009

I don't mean the bars on their own

I mean compared to a Mac, the machine you seem to love.

By windywoo on 21 Nov 2009

Hot to trot

Since when were we pushing the Envy 15 as a gaming laptop? We tested it just as we would any other laptop.

We didn't force HP squeeze an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4830 alongside a 45nm Core i7. Frankly, I think a less greedy GPU would have been a much better choice. A laptop should not get this hot. There is simply no reasonable excuse.

Instead we're faced with a lightweight laptop with immense power, dreadful battery life, an unpleasant keyboard and a dreadful trackpad. Its priorities are all over the shop.

Designing a good laptop is all about balance, and while the Envy 15 is a specification junkie's dream, it's horrible to use.

By SashaMuller on 21 Nov 2009

Scren resolutions

My biggest issue with this particular laptop is that HP seems to have given UK users a completely different machine to those in the US.

UK based purchasers just have 2 options to choose from on HP's website, whereas in the US, there are a variety of configurations of HDD, Ram etc available. Moreover though, the biggest issue is that the UK only has the screen option with the resolution as detailed in the review here, whereas in the US the standard option is full 1080p resolution (1920x1080). This is almost double the number of pixels of the UK version. Comments on HP's own forumsn indicate that the higher resolution option may become available in the UK, but with no suggestion of whether this is definite or when it will happen.

To me, it just doesn't make sense to purchase a premium level product like this with the screen that is included in the UK & I can't see quite why HP thought that it made sense to downgrade it in this way either.

By mbtaylor on 29 Dec 2009

Good Spec - Terrible Notebook

I purchased this yesterday, installed everything I needed and like most was in amazement about the specification and performance. This is where it all ended very quickly, under light loads the head and noise was unbearable and the screen is a total wash out. The keyboard feels cheap and so ultimately does everything except the box it came in (which is quite nice and apple chic'(ish). Even my girlfriend who isn't computer savvy thought it looked cheap and low budget. I spent another £100 on a MacBook Pro, installed Windows 7 and love it. Alright I can't play MW2 on it but I have a PC for that. If you buy this for a gaming laptop for the power you may want to connect a screen, keyboard and mouse as all are terrible which in my opinion should make to steer clear of this really. Good attempt at a high end laptop but no cigar.. not even a lighter from me.

By Brother_DeeJ on 31 Dec 2009

Revised Envy

The HP website reveals a new UK Envy variant is due imminently.

The Envy 15-1110ea appears to of brought the UK model in-line with the US equivalent and confirmed the high performance, innovative nature of the Envy product line.

Improvements include:

- Full HD 1920x1080 screen which is rumoured to be non-glossy.

- ATI Mobility Radeon 5830 (DX11 capable)

- USB 3.0 ports

It is not clear from the US forums whether or not the heat/noise issues have been cured, however they do label the model as being "generation 2". I await a PCPro review with great anticipation.

By dpazz on 13 Feb 2010

Leave a comment

You need to Login or Register to comment.