Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Intentional or not it bears more in resemblance with Apple's lineup than its own predecessors, it's part of the very first wave of computers with Windows 7 pre-installed, it places a large emphasis on battery life but still manages great performance, and it's a "luxury" PC that actually provides some pretty good excuses for its inflated pricetag. We've spent a nice solid week with the laptop, so find out if the Envy 13 can live up to its promise after the break."

HP has been a busy boy. In the past couple of months, it has released the HP Mini 311, dm3 and now for its premium line of ultra-portables, we have the Envy 13. It is pretty. It does perform well. It also comes with an optional battery slice to give you that all day computing. But none of these really make the Envy 13 stand out. The only new thing that it can really trumpet is that it uses Windows 7. I am trying hard to come out with something to say that makes the Envy 13 a must buy, especially something to justify the $1700 price tag, but I cannot. Can anyone think of why someone would pay the price of several netbooks for this?

"When Voodoo PC came under HP's umbrella a few years back, we began to see all sorts of interesting collaborations: The Blackbird desktop and the HP Voodoo Envy 133, with its sleek laptop looks, garnered second glances from lustful nerds. Now, the Voodoo brand name falls by the wayside as HP adopts the Envy moniker for this superstylish, silvery line."

Benefiting from its purchase of VoodooPC, HP has tried to use the brand to sell more premium level computers. Their latest stab is the HP Envy 13 and 15. Details on the Envy 15 are pretty scare though, but HP has not been shy about what the Envy 13 packs. When I first looked at the specifications, I was actually a little disappointed. The Radeon HD 4330 GPU is pretty pedestrian in my opinion, but then again, this is a 13" screen laptop we are talking about. Sure, the 4330 will not compare against GTX 280M GPUs in 17 inch behemoths, but it also probably weighs less than one third of a gaming beast. The aesthetic design looks fairly good (yes, very Applish) and probably is targeted towards those who want high mobility, but are not quite willing to compromise on the horsepower that a netbook fails to provide. And look good while doing it! Still, the weak GPU, while discrete kind of turns me away, especially with the increasing usefulness of GPGPUs.