Review: HP Pavilion TouchSmart Sleekbook 15

CES 2013 is where you'll find Windows 8 devices galore. So it's interesting seeing how some PC hardware manufacturers are trying to stick out from the rest of the pack. Take Hewlett-Packard and the company's HP Pavilion Touchbook Sleekbook, for example.

The Pavilion Touchbook Sleekbook is actually a lot like the vanilla plain Pavilion Sleekbook, which was also present. Both devices sport an AMD A-Series APU (Advanced Processing Unit) CPU, 6GB of memory (which can upped to 8GB), and 1TB hard drive.

When it comes to connecting it to cameras, smart phones, external displays, and the like, you have HDMI plus both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports.

HP has also loaded it with plenty of their proprietary solutions: HP TrueVision HD Webcams and HP MyRoom are designed for video calling and sharing images, HP CoolSense regulates temperature, and HP ProtectSmart keeps files safe and sound in case the Touchbook Sleekbook gets knocked around.

Again, everything above is common to the regular Pavilion Sleekbook. So what's the key difference? The name should be everyone's biggest clue; the Pavilion Touchbook Sleekbook has a 15.6-inch touch capable screen, to offer an alternative method to interacting with Windows 8.

Speaking of touching, the feel of the machine overall is its most distinct attribute. The machine sports a plastic body, resulting in a finish that's shiny. Very shiny. It also sparkles: instead of being solid black, it's covered with what can only be described as glitter.

The Sleekbook is HP's line of low-cost laptop alternative, so one might make the guess that such a design choice was intentionally to perhaps make it appeal to the tastes of the younger set. That's only a wild guess, and as unfair such an assumption might be, many others will have the same gut reaction.

Sticking with the impression that the HP Pavilion Touchbook Sleekbook was engineered for children, one might assume that it's a lightweight device, but that's simply not true; it's shockingly heavy.

No specific weight numbers were handy when asked, and considering the size of the screen, perhaps some degree of weight is to be expected. But the toy-like appearance and feel simply betrays those expectations.

Exacerbating the situation is the hinge. It's stiff and makes opening and closing difficult. The keyboard also felt a bit mushy. Did we mention how, again due to the finish, it collects fingerprints like nothing else?

Yet there is one genuine positive of the device, and it's the trackpad. It's the same texture that adorns the speaker grill, so the end result is something that feels very nice to slide one's fingers around with (as well as very different).

Just messing around with it for just a minute leaves an impression, and a hope that other laptops follow suit.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned key differentiating factor is also a major disappointment. The responsiveness of the touchscreen was very accurate, but the image quality was sub-par. The colors were also noticeably washed out. The 1366 x 768 resolution, for a 15-inch laptop, feels rather dated for 2013, even if it is a budget machine.

And when compared to the HP Pavilion Sleekbook, its touch capable bother is still not the best bargain either. Given all the strikes against it, the US$649.99 is somewhat hard to swallow. Though be sure to check it out for yourself, when it arrives on Febuary 3.

See more laptops and netbooks Add comment

View the original article here

Review: HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook

Try to sell most of us a laptop that can't run normal programs, never mind traditional operating systems such as Windows 8 or OS X, and instead only runs a web browser - forcing you to do everything online - and we'd hesitate.

ut that's precisely what a Chromebook like the HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook is; a laptop that boots into the lightweight operating system Chrome OS, where all you can do is launch Google's Chrome web browser.

It might sound like a product that nobody in their right mind would buy, but there are two reasons why it's not as clear cut as that. The first is that we've actually come to quite like Chromebooks here at TechRadar, and not just because they're cheap - we'll come to why shortly.

The other reason, though, is that what started as a tiny dribble of models and manufacturers has turned if not into a torrent then into a steady trickle. Of course just because we're seeing an increasing number of Chromebooks hit the market it doesn't mean they must be successful, but PC manufacturers wouldn't bother making and marketing Chromebooks if they didn't think there was at least a potential market.

Now HP's Pavilion 14 Chromebook joins the slightly cheaper, slim, light and ARM-powered Samsung Chromebook, the cheaper still Acer C7 Chromebook with its 320GB hard disk, and the hugely more expensive, beautifully designed Google Chromebook Pixel with its high-res 3:2 screen.

Four Chromebooks compared to the many hundreds of Windows laptops or even the nearly dozen basic Apple MacBooks doesn't sound like much, but it still feels like a sector that's getting to be cautiously optimistic.

If you decide you want to buy a Chromebook or you just want a reliable, genuinely usable laptop with a price tag of just £249 / AU$399 / US$329.99, the HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook distinguishes itself from the other models with a bigger, 14-inch screen.

Chrome OS won't suit everyone. It may not even suit most people yet, but it's true that it's constantly evolving, and so are our computing habits and needs. So while you can't currently do video editing, professional photography editing or coding on a Chromebook - although online services are springing up that at least begin to address these demands - many of us would cope fine with just a web browser.

Think about what you do on a traditional PC, for example, and there's a good chance either that you do essentially everything through a browser anyway - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, webmail - or that those things that you currently do with regular apps such as Word and Excel could be replaced with web services such as Google Docs.

You might think, that's all very well, but if these are all web apps, I have to be online to use them, and since the Pavilion 14 doesn't have a SIM card slot for 3G mobile browsing, it's just a useless door-stop when I can't get Wi-Fi access. But as we'll see, that's not quite the case.

Let's start, though, with the specs. Now, specs with a Chromebook mean a little less than they do with normal laptops, so we can't just put a Chromebook next to a laptop from Lenovo, Asus, Dell or even HP and say that because it has a weaker processor, less storage, a lower-res screen and fewer, lower-specced ports that it's worse.

That's because, since Chrome OS is a lightweight operating system whose only job is to run a browser - albeit a fast, capable browser with support for complex HTML 5 and Flash - the hardware needs comparatively little oomph to do its job well.

The HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook has an Intel Celeron 847 processor running at 1.1GHz at its heart, and the 14-c002sa model we tested had 4GB of RAM.

Storage is courtesy of a 16GB SSD, which we think is the right choice; the 320GB hard disk in the Acer C7 is a bit redundant in a computer that's designed to be a thin client to web services, and because hard disks are slower than solid-state drives, all it did was slow the overall responsiveness of the machine down.

Put together, nothing about these core specs suggest anything other than pedestrian performance, but in fact they're more than sufficient for a Chromebook. The HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook feels slick and fast and responsive, and it coped well with everything we threw at it.

There are three USB 2.0 ports - no, no USB 3.0, but that's totally fine, since a Chromebook would have no real use for a faster connection, at least in its current incarnation - and an HDMI port, which is extra useful now that Chrome OS supports extended desktop view as well as mirroring on an external monitor.

There's also a combined mic/headphone jack, a full-depth SD card slot and, as well as 802.11a/b/g/n, a very welcome Ethernet port.

The built-in webcam is, as you'd expect, HD resolution. But as you'd expect, 'HD' does not necessarily equate to 'high quality'.

Although the 14-inch screen is low-res by today's standards at 1366 x 786, and is a little washed out with poor viewing angles, we have seen worse, and we have to remember that this is in a £250 / AU$400 / US$330 laptop.

Weighing 1.8kg (4lbs), it's not ultrabook-light, but it's not going to break your back when slung in a laptop bag.

One thing that's flat-out bad on the HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook, though, is the battery. The battery takes up just a sliver of this 14-inch laptop's spacious body.

When battery life is so poor as it is here - giving somewhere between three and four hours of solid use, or perhaps a little more if you're lucky - and space in the chassis isn't at a premium as it would be with an ultrabook or a netbook, we can't help but feel cheated when HP has stuck a meagre 4-cell Li-Ion battery in.

View the original article here