HP Envy 6 review

HP’s Envy label has always been reserved for premium products with flashy design and strong performance, so it came as no surprise when the company announced its latest line of Ultrabooks would carry the Envy label. The 15.6in Envy 6 is a slim and light Ultrabook for a very reasonable £700.

In keeping with HP’s collaboration with Beats Audio, the Envy 6 is adorned in a mixture of black brushed metal and red rubberised plastic, which gives it a style you wouldn’t expect for the price of the laptop. Despite being just 20mm thick, the chassis still has room for plenty of ports, including three USB, two of which are USB3, a multi-format card reader, HDMI, Ethernet and twin 3.5mm audio jacks.

The dark colour scheme continues inside, with an all-black keyboard tray and metal-effect touchpad. This looks great, but it’s a shame the keyboard tray isn’t backlit to make it easier to use the laptop in low lighting. The Chiclet-style keys are all full-size and well-spaced for comfortable typing, with a reasonable amount of travel. They are springy enough to bounce back quickly, providing plenty of tactile feedback to your fingers as you type. By default, the function keys are mapped to HP’s own shortcuts, but you can change this behaviour in the BIOS.

We haven’t been particularly impressed with HP’s touchpads in the past, mainly because they’ve used an all-in-one design where the buttons are part of the touchpad. This design may not have changed, but the driver software certainly has, as we had none of the problems we’ve experienced in the past – the Envy 6’s touchpad was responsive and accurate, recognising multi-touch gestures and making it easy to navigate the Windows desktop. We especially like the way a double-tap to the top left corner will disable the touchpad completely, which is useful when you’re using a separate mouse and don’t want touchpad taps interfering with your typing.

Our first real criticism of the laptop centres on the display. A 1,366×768 resolution is standard for the price, but the image quality isn’t anything to shout about. The glossy finish gives colours plenty of pop, but also makes light reflections a real issue, although there is at least a decent amount of screen tilt to counter the effect. Viewing angles are very shallow, so we noticed changing colours when we weren’t looking at the laptop straight on, and the screen isn’t particularly bright, so it was difficult to pick out the details in some of our darker test images. The screen has been the highlight of other Envy laptops we’ve seen, so it’s disappointing to see such a basic one here.

Sound quality was a different story – although Beats Audio is little more than an equaliser preset, the small subwoofer on the bottom of the laptop gives a welcome boost to sound quality compared to other Ultrabooks. Bass has more presence, and even at full volume there was no sharpness or distortion during our test tracks. You’ll still get better sound from a pair of headphones, but the speakers provide audio good enough for more than just YouTube clips.

The Envy 6 is powered by an Intel Ivy Bridge processor, and is more than capable when it comes to desktop applications. The dual-core i5-3317U normally runs at 1.7GHz and can Turbo Boost up to 2.6GHz. The laptop has a standard 4GB of RAM and completed our multimedia benchmarks with an overall score of 51, so you should be able to run all your everyday applications smoothly.

The laptop’s main hard disk is a 500GB mechanical model rather than an SSD. HP has fitted a 32GB cache drive to the laptop, which stores frequently-accessed files to make the operating system feel snappier and to help speed up boot times. We could reach the Windows desktop in 14 seconds, so it was doing its job. We expected the mechanical hard disk and 15in display to have an impact on battery life, but the Envy 6 was simply superb away from the mains. In our light-use test, it managed almost ten hours on battery power alone – if you stick to light tasks, you’ll easily get a full day’s work out of a single charge.

Integrated graphics have come a long way in a few short years, to the point where the Envy 6’s Intel HD 4000 chipset is almost capable of playing modern games. Our Dirt 3 test, which uses 4x anti-aliasing, was a little too taxing – we only saw a stuttering 16.3fps at our standard settings. However, with anti-aliasing disabled and with most details set to medium, we saw a just-playable frame rate of between 28fps and 31fps.

For £700, the Envy 6 is a fantastic general-purpose laptop. It lacks dedicated graphics, even if Intel’s integrated GPU is an improvement over last year’s design, and the screen is a significant weakness, but the phenomenal battery life and excellent desktop performance make this a serious contender for the best mid-range Ultrabook we’ve seen. Other 15in ultra-portables, such as Samsung Series 9 (15in), cost almost double the price, so if you’re on a mid-range budget this is a superb choice.