Gadgetory

well this is Johanna for The Verge and this is HP's first ultra book the folio 13 and as you can tell from the design it is more aimed at business users though HP's saying it is for everyone the design is definitely reminiscent of some of HP's business laptops like the elite book or pro book it's got a nice aluminum lid and a comfortable bottom with sort of a rubberish feel but at 0.7 inches and 3.3 pounds it is much thicker and heavier than some of the other ultra books that said it is still pretty light in hand and it is pretty thin given the amount of full-size ports there's an Ethernet two USB ports an HDMI port and an SD card slot where HP really does stand out amongst the other ultra ebooks is both on its keyboard and touchpad the keyboard is my favorite on any ultra book to date the keys have a really nice height to them and have a rubberish feel to them that make them really comfortable and unlike some of the other ones it's backlit the touchpad still isn't as responsive as the one on the MacBook Air but it's pretty good for an ultrabook to finger scrolling is really smooth and navigating is just fine the 13-inch display isn't as bright as some of the others on ultrabooks and it has pretty bad viewing angles on top of that it has a matte bezel that doesn't match the glossy screen which I found pretty annoying for $900 HP equips the folio 13 with a solid array of specs including a Core i5 processor four gigs of RAM and 128 gigabyte SSD all of those together provide good performance and the SSD boots the system in 33 seconds and resumes it from sleep in five seconds even better it has great battery life on the verge battery test it got over seven hours of runtime which is better than not only all the ultra ebooks but even the MacBook Air however my biggest complaints about the system come with the software and the heat from the bottom of the system the bottom of the laptop can get pretty warm and it also gets quite loud where the fan is located HP also bundles the system with a ton of crap where the desktop is littered with links and shortcuts to websites you'll probably never go to for $900 the HP folio 13 provides the best blend of performance battery life and ergonomics of all the ultra books on the market however it's not as thin and light as some of the others for $400 more you can get the MacBook Air which is thinner lighter and has a better display still HP has managed to make a really great ultra book you