Netbook Reviews – Laptop Reviews

HP’s Envy 14 is certainly a head-turning laptop. Its clean lines and rounded edges look stunning, with a dimpled bronze finish and an edge-toedge display.

The stylish touchpad is made from a single panel, with areas marked by lines where the buttons should be. The entire panel moves when you press these, and although the action is light and produces a distinct click, the button areas are still sensitive to touch, so the cursor often moves just when you’re about to click.

Unlike other powerful desktop replacement laptops, it has a 14.5in screen and weighs 2.4kg. It also ran for over five hours in the light-use battery test.

The screen’s 1,366×768 resolution is fine at this size (although 1,600×900 would have been better) and the LED backlight is even and reasonably bright.

Contrast is good, and although we’ve seen better colour accuracy, it isn’t a major problem. There’s no Blu-ray drive, but the ATI Radeon HD 5650 graphics card with 1GB of RAM will enable you to play 3D games.

The laptop also provides 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard disk, HDMI and mini DisplayPort outputs.