Review: HP Envy 4-1002TX laptop

Summary

The HP Envy 4 is  the massive ultrabook money can buy this side of Rs. 60,000. The Samsung Series 5 will rightly have something to say about it - neck and neck in terms of system performance, but the HP steals the march with much better looks and a slightly more compact form factor. Where the HP has a clear advantage is gaming, with the Radeon HD 7670M consistently scoring more than the Series 5's Nvidia GeForce GT 620M.

With HP you will always gets of best performance as well as best style. The new HP Envy series is a Fantastic collection of budget notebooks that promises enriched technology to suit your personal and business demands. The HP Envy 4-1002TX laptop comes with a variety of features to suit all your computing needs and desires. This Envy series laptop from HP is powered by the latest Intel 3rd Generation Core i5 processor which delivers excellent and efficient performance. Running on an ideal user interface of Windows 7 Home Basic operating system, this laptop is suitable beginners and professionals.

Style and Portability

The laptop is sure to arrest a lot of attention with its stylish look as it provides style and comfort galore. The exteriors have a smooth glossy finish to it that gives it an elegant and posh appearance. A smooth curved bezel ensures that you handle the device with great comfort. The device provides easy mobility and ultra-portability as it weighs only 1.75 kg. The laptop can be easily accommodated into your backpack, thanks to its sleek dimensions of 339.3 x 235.7 x 19.81 mm.

Cast in a classy looking bezel, the compact 14 inch screen of the Envy Series laptop offers great angles for your viewing pleasure. The LED Backlit Widescreen Display treats your eyes to visually appealing images at a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. Unfold the lid of this notebook to enter a lavish world with the skillfully crafted interiors. The Dura-coat Island-style Keyboard helps in accurate and error-free typing as it consists of a set of large, well-spaced keys. Navigating through web pages is tremendously smooth and hassle-free, courtesy of the touchpad which comes with multi-touch gesture support.

Features & Specifications
The Envy 4-1002TX is powered by the Ivy Bridge series of processors – the Core i5 - 3317U clocked at 1.7GHz, with Turbo Boost taking it to 2.6GHz. There is 4GB of RAM to help it along. On the spec sheet, the Samsung Series 5 (read our review) has 6GB of RAM - however, this maybe an example of how the spec sheet doesn’t really show the whole picture, as we will explain in the Performance section.

The Envy has a 14-inch display, with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. It starts on the correct foot – natively quite bright, but not as much as the Series 5. However, the Envy’s display is very comfortable to use for long periods of time, because it has a slightly softer colour handling. Also, adequate crispness allows you to read text clearly with no visible edge noise. However, the display is rather reflective, and that is something we have deducted points for, in the corresponding ratings. Also, the colours may feel softer and very comfortable if you aren’t using this for multimedia viewing, but the display does feel a tad washed out when you are watching a movie on it.

For your storage needs, there is a 500GB hard drive on the HP Envy 4. However, to speed things along, there is a 32GB flash storage for the caching tasks. Incidentally, the Samsung Series 5 has a 24GB flash storage, but unlike them, HP doesn’t have nifty software that allows you to enable or disable this feature, or to clean up the flash drive periodically.

The island keyboard is extremely confortable to get used to, and switching from a MacBook to test the Envy, it didn’t take too long to get used to it, and rediscover my typing mojo! Adequate key travel and the response is consistent across the keys. The keyboard deck is pretty clean, except for the red Beats Audio key giving it a bit of colour. The HP Envy 4’s touchpad has a brushed metal circular imprint, and is like it is sitting on a raised platform with a trench dug all around it! The left and right click keys are integrated, and some who used this did complain that the keys actually kick in a little too close to the bottom left and bottom right edge. But then again, it is all about getting used to it. Multi-touch gestures work well on this touchpad, and upgrading to Windows 8 should be on your radar.

What we fail to understand is why does this ultrabook come with Windows 7 Basic preloaded on the machine. Considering the price of this machine, and the fact that an ultrabook is considered a “premium” device, at least a Home Premium edition was expected. Just like how almost all other ultrabook manufacturers are doing it! Thankfully, this time around, there is slightly less amount of preinstalled software on the ultrabook. HP has also streamlined its own utilities, features of which can now be accessed via the Support Assistant software. This ultrabook is compatible with the CoolSense feature, but since this is version 2.0 of the software, you can only switch it on or off. It is surprising, considering the older 1.0 version allowed you to choose between multiple settings for fan assisted cooling, and how the processor was clocked down.