The Envy 13 is less than an inch thick and is crafted from aluminium and magnesium alloy, making it a solid but relatively heavy device. Opening the lid reveals an edge-to-edge protective display glass over the screen that gives it a ‘frameless' look, as well as a full-sized keyboard and multi-touch touchpad with an integrated click pad.
Two USB ports, a HDMI port, an SD card slot, a headphone out/microphone in port, and an AC adaptor port are found along the sides of the notebook. This limited input/output ports forced us to connect a USB Ethernet adapter as well as an external DVD drive, which is annoying as it could have been integrated onto the notebook in the first place.
The keyboard is well-spaced and responsive, with
HP putting media control keys on the F1 – F12 keys. This means that if you want to close a window, you would have to press alt+fn+F4 instead of the normal alt+F4 combination. The touchpad is wide and its multi-touch gestures allowed us to zoom in/out of photos, scroll through documents, and even rotate pages.
Our test unit had an Intel Core 2 Duo processor (2.13Ghz), 5GB of RAM, 160GB of storage (SSD drive), and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 (512MB) video card that is suitable for casual gaming. Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) is pre-installed on the Envy 13.
