Gadgetory

hi i'm scott stein senior editor at cnet.com now the ultrabooks of CES have come and gone and they're gonna be a lot more ultrabook still to come but one of the most interesting solid and reliable ones we've seen so far this year is the HP folio 13 now this is a small business oriented laptop it's technically an ultrabook although what is an ultrabook anyway at this point the lines are getting so blurred it's hard to figure it out what this is is a 13 inch thin laptop with SSD storage like a MacBook Air except thicker than a MacBook Air and heavier than a MacBook Air what you are getting here is a more affordable price $8.99 at its starting point which compared to that 1200 or so price of a MacBook Air is much more affordable deal and you get 128 gigabytes of SSD storage 4 gigabytes of RAM and you get that same zippy type of Core i5 processor that's low voltage but feels very nice and functionally fast on these types of laptops you also get a battery that lasts about 6 hours which was really good maybe not quite as good as a MacBook Air but approaching it and you also get more ports on this check out the ethernet also USB 3.0 and an SD card slot a lot of those are missing on a lot of other ultra books creating a bit of a disconnect actually taking this one out to CES was kind of fun because the Ethernet port made it a little more reliable for landlines now it is going to take up more room in your backpack but it's a little over three pounds and it's still pretty light compared to other laptops so it depends on what you're comparing to it has a small business type feel the brush metal lid kind of a slightly no-nonsense design but you know what it pays attention to the details particularly the fact that doesn't feel very flexi at all has a nice rubberized bottom so it stays put on your desk if you're typing a lot and the keyboard is really nice it's full size it has some nice key travel felt really good when typing and the trackpad is pretty large and uses a multi-touch with a click pad type on it now everything else is you know kind of par for the course integrated graphics the speakers are fine the webcams maybe a little better than average what are you using this thing for using it to write using it to get online the startup time the boot up time on this really fast and the cold boot up time from sleep or hibernation when you lift the lid was also really zippy and functional it doesn't make a slight whirring sound when using it for a while but if you play with those cool sense controls for for cooling maybe you can find a perfect middle zone for yourself overall at 899 it's a really good value and probably one of the best feeling writing ultra books that we've seen I've seen in the past year now if you want to pay a little bit more spend $150 more for Windows 7 Professional you can but really at that $8.99 price it's really got basically everything that you're looking for I'm Scott Stein and that's a quick look at the HP folio 13 a business