Gadgetory

hi I'm Scott Steinem if you are shopping for a laptop this time of year one word comes to mind Ultrabook ultra book ultra book if you haven't heard it already you're seeing tons of laptops showing up now in the thin and even affordable space trying to sell you an interesting package that's portable and maybe even affordable and one of the ones that comes to mind right now is the HP Envy now the HP Envy was a top-of-the-line brand before in the HP laptop spectrum now it applies to a more mid-range set of laptops the HP Envy for Ultrabook and there's also a 15 inch model and then making this a little more confusing you've got the sleek books which are AMD powered laptops and sometimes even HP's website didn't seem to quite get it right I think this is called the sleek book when I look for it last nevertheless what the ultra book term means is that there is an Intel processor inside and sleek book means AMD which generally means more affordable and we did review a sleek book on our site a $5.99 model very affordable for what it contained inside in a 15.6 inch screen size this is a 14 inch screen size it's selling in Best Buy in a retail configuration or 679 now for an Intel powered ultra book that's really good but you have to consider what it contains here there's a core i3 processor from last year it's an older processor that's showing up on a few models you're starting to see that on some of these budget models including the Asus Zenbook ux301 you get in here is still pretty good value you got a 500 gigabyte hard drive four gigs of RAM that's basically all you need plus the core i3 processor does pretty well but it's more equivalent to that AMD processor than to some of those faster core i5s from this year that you start to see all over the place in a lot of ultrabooks and the MacBook Air now you're also getting a thicker slightly heavier ultrabook here there's a 14 inch is a slightly different size weight in fact it looks a lot like other HP laptops now this has an Ethernet port this has an SD card slot USB 3.0 and a really good battery life of about 6 hours but a lot of other ultrabooks have that too so that's not quite as unique and when you consider that this has Intel HP 3000 graphics not 4000 which is the newer one games really don't play well in this at all so don't rely on it for that but if you're looking for an all-around laptop and you want to get under $700 you may want to take a look at this just consider that you can configure a variety of other options and get yourself a little bit faster if you want or drop down to an even more affordable price with the AMD processor another feature on the HP Envy that makes it a little bit unique is Beats Audio although Beats Audio shows up on most HP products at this point in this instance it's a speaker bar that's up above the keyboard that pumps out supposedly better quality sound I think it's better in an equaliser forum for headphones than in the speaker bar which is loud but not the best speaker quality that I've ever heard hopefully that gives you a little bit of a clearer idea of what the budget landscape looks like right now and a pretty good budget choice in the HP Envy for 10:15 DX that's the configuration model for this I'm Scott Stein and that's a look at this particular HP Envy for Ultrabook