HP ENVY 13-1030NR 13.3-Inch Magnesium Alloy Laptop (Windows 7 Home Premium)
- Intel Core2 Duo Processor SL9400 (1.86 GHz, 6MB L2 Cache, 1066 MHz FSB)
- 3 GB DDR3 System Reminiscence (1 Dimm) (expandable to 5 GB)
- 250GB (5400RPM) SATA Hard Drive
- Real Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, Up to 17.25 Hours of Battery Life
- 13.1″ Diagonal High Classification LED HP Radiance Infinity Widescreen Show (1366×768)
- ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 Graphics M92LP with up to 1757MB whole graphics reminiscence with 512 MB dedicated
Meet your business-class seatmate: Precision crafted from the highest quality metals; super portable starting at 3.74 lbs. and less than 1-inch thin; all-day and into the night battery life. Each ENVY 13 notebook is individually crafted from aluminum and a magnesium alloy then artfully inscribed with a subtle design. Each is built with best-in-class components then individually tuned for most performance.Experience full-throttle graphics and superb performance. And up to 16.25 hours of battery life with built-in Extended-Life battery; enough to keep you productive and entertained during nearly an entire flight from LA to Sidney. Each aspect of the ENVY 13 architecture was carefully chosen to enable exceptional performance and battery life for the frequent traveler.
Rating: 
(out of 4 reviews)
hp notebook review
I now own 5 laptops. They range from small netbooks and tablet PC’s to a 17″ HP Entertainment laptop. As a contractor I used the 17″ for all my meetings and it served its purpose well. The problem is I wanted something smaller, and a longer lasting battery.
I had looked at the envy 15 but it runs hot even while idle. I just did not like the heat on my palms as I typed. After much investigate the envy 13 seemed to meet all my requirements. ITs a very portable laptop and even with the slice (superfluous battery) attached its thinner and lighter than all my other laptops.
Even when playing graphic intensive games it does not break a sweat. As for the battery/s I’m getting about 11 hours of constant use with Bluetooth on and wifi off. With wifi and Bluetooth on and streaming movies I get about 7 hours of constant use.
The laptop is small so the IO ports are at a minimum. It only has two USB ports so I bought a Microsoft Bluetooth mouse and it works perfect. The built-in external DVD drive gets its power from the USB and also acts as a USB hub supplying 2 ports.
There does not seem to be any user accessible panels on the laptop so you can’t exchange the hard drive of update the reminiscence. Even even if the laptop has only 3GB installed it does have windows 7 64-bit installed and can handle up to 5GB. But now I see no way to upgrade.
One thing I noticed is that the laptop has an accelometer installed so it can detect movement. When on the battery it will park the hard drives if you pick up the laptop. This is indicated by a small orange LED that turns on in place of the normal white hard drive LED.
The speakers are probably the weakest top on the laptop. They just don’t have any productivity for most movies so you will have to use earphones or hold a external speaker set. I got a pair of those tiny USB powered HP speakers and they have bounty of volume and are small enough to keep in my laptop bag.
As will all laptops there is reasonably a lot of bloteware installed. It took me three solid days to get rid of all the crap but now the machine runs at between 0-2% CPU treatment when idle.
Would I hold the laptop again? The answer is certainly YES.
I really probable more from HP. I read fantastic reviews about this laptop, and most of them were right on the money: A excellent attempt to a different breed of PCs but falling small on key points.
I was close to send it back but i kept it at the end primarily because of the size and weight and also because i needed a sturdy laptop. These are the key points that not permitted the HP Envy from being a magnificent machine and a right contender against Apple:
- Battery life not even close to 5 hours nor 16 with the additional battery: HP really oversold the battery capacity here. Expect to get 2 hours at the most when by wifi. With the superfluous battery you probably may possibly get 5 to 6 hours but that’s it. And then the weight goes from 3.8 pounds to 5.3 so, not so light to get more juice. My wife owns a MacbookPro that she uses for 5 to 6 continuous hours with no sweat and certainly less strain on her arm.
- Trackpad: The worst ever. I thought that because of the product age (about 6 – 7 months now) they had come up with a better driver for it. Nope. It still stinks. Clicks are limited to a tiny area in the trackpad. Why did HP make such a huge trackpad with no buttons (a la Mac) but limit the area where you can click? Doesn’t make any sense to me at all.
- Price: If you are conscious about money and need to save some money look elsewhere, this is not worth the money you pay. Again, I kept it only because the magnesium casing was vital to me but you probably can find something similar from Asus or Dell where you can save some dough.
My new job allowed me to hold my own laptop with a $1400 budget….yeah, not a terrible start. So I shopped around looking for something as far away from the Lenovo business look I am used to. I am not a Mac person at all but I had to be honest and check out the MacBook and MacBook Pro. All seemed to be the same in price and similar in specs but our company didn’t support Mac (yet) and they offered a free download of Microsoft Office Business 2007 and lots of other PC based software. If I went Mac I would have to come out of pocket for this software and probably more. Couple hundred bucks, right?
So I looked around at Acer, MSI, Dell and finished up spotting this lil beauty. So far, so excellent. I will say the only disappointing feature is the battery life “claim”. I get around 2 1/2 – 3 1/2 hrs of battery without the slice battery just on the 4cell. With the slice battery I would say it added another 3-6 hrs in various types of use. So it’s not terrible especially with the slice option but it is no where near the 10+ hrs it claims on the HP site. The design is sleek and sexy. I really like the monolithic style screen and have used the webcam to chat with my kids when I travel. The keypad is fantastic but the trackpad does take some getting used to. For me, this isn’t a huge issue since I use a retractable mouse at home, at the office and when I travel.
It came with Win 7 64 bit and Core Duo processor is really quick. I never intended to run heavy apps on this but use regularly use Google Chrome, MS Outlook, Lotus Notes and MediaMonkey at the same time and they all run very smoothly. The laptop isn’t too loud or noisy but I added an attention to make sure it stays silent and cool.
On a side note, there is only HDMI out so I recently ordered the HDMI to VGA adapter from HP for when I have to present but have yet to test it out.
All in all, I am pretty stoked about my HP Envy 13. As I said in the title, not too shabby of a laptop.
The HP Envy 13 is truly one of the best laptops I have ever owned (I ordered mine thru the HP site with all the bells and whistles, you can always find an online coupon to bring the price down about $300 less if you look), it has everything I wanted exept a harddrive better than 250GB. I chose to give it a try and gave my wife my Sony VAIO VGN-Z850G/B because I wanted a laptop that was more solid with up to date styling (Still, NOBODY beats Sony VAIO’s for performance and the latest technology, you just have be willing to pay for it). My Teen Kids both own newer MacBooks, the older owning the Pro. They were chosen because all their other Lemming friends had them. Comparison wise the Envy 13 blows the Macs away. Not more than is a comarison review from the hpfansite, the reviewer didn’t even mention that the Envy 13 has the NEWER Core 2 Duo processors, a quicker video card and a brighter screen with higher resolution. Possibly by years end Apple may possibly come up with a newer laptop and fool people into thinking that were the first to make new innovations that are light years ahead of PC’s (the truth is Sony does and did, do some investigate). Yea, and I still do like Sony Vaio’s too! By the way Apple, my kids thank you for finally adding an SD card slot in the Mac (but still no HDMI?)
Here is a comparison from the hpfansite:
Thanks to HP United Kingdom posting up the product page for the HP Envy 13, I finally have some numbers to play with and make a comparison ABOUT the comparisons people are making out there. First off, a small intro about what’s been happening since HP announced their Envy 13 and Envy 15 designer+performance notebooks five days ago… people have been touting the Envy 15 as the notebook that practically `owns’ (AKA pwns) the Apple MacBook Pro (any existing MB Pro) with its 1 GB of ATI graphics, quad core Mobile Core i7 option, solid construction, stuff like that.
On the contrary, the Envy 15′s sibling, the Envy 13 has been called `less impressive’ and `an overpriced copycat’ of the Apple MacBook Pro 13. Really now? I digress. First off, let’s take a look at the dimensions of the 13 inch MacBooks available.
Note: I’ll be by centimeters since HP UK has no measurements for the Envy 13 in inches and it’s only honest to use manufacturer supplied dimensions, instead of DIY conversion.
Apple MacBook White aka Plastic (13 inch model) = 32.5 x 22.7 x 2.75 cm @ 2.27 kg
Apple MacBook Pro Unibody (13 inch model) = 32.5 x 22.7 x 2.41 cm @ 2.04 kg
Got that? Now for the Envy 13:
HP Envy 13 (13 inch model) = 32.0 x 21.5 x 2.05 cm @ 1.70 kg (Source: HP UK)
The Envy 13 is a excellent 3.6 millimeters slimmer than Apple’s Unibody MacBook and also shorter/narrow. So there’s no way HP may possibly have packs in a optical drive into the Envy 13, neither may possibly they have stuffed in an Ethernet port without making the notebook thicker. HOWEVER, HP did manage to push in double the graphics reminiscence (512 MB on Envy vs 256 MB on MacBook), a removable batteryand most `elemental ports’ – things that I would personally appreciate more than an optical drive or Ethernet port. Not to mention the Envy 13 is supposed to feature `Beats’ audio, which people claim to produce much better sound than conventional notebook speakers.
Back to my top, people are complaining that the Envy 13′s $1699 price tag is too high. Why buy the Envy 13 when the so-called similar Apple MacBook Pro 13 can be had for 30% less at $1199, right? Incorrect! I say that it’s only right to equate the HP Envy 13 to Apple’s MacBook Air (both spec and price wise).
Apple MacBook Air (13 inch model) = 32.5 x 22.7 x 1.94 cm @ 1.36 kg
That’s right folks, the HP Envy 13 is mere millimeters thicker than the MacBook Air. In fact, the HP Envy 13 is overall, a more compact notebook compared to the Apple MacBook Air. If you equate their volumes, the HP Envy 13 is 1410.4 cubic cm while the Apple MacBook Air comes in at 1431.235 cubic cm. Austerely place, if you may possibly fill water (but delight don’t in real life) into the empty casings of both notebooks, the MacBook Air would hold more liquid (larger) than the Envy.
Fine, the size difference isn’t huge, but my top was to prove the Envy is positioned closer to the Air than the Pro. But the Envy and Air have more than size in common: Lack of an optical drive, ultra-slim profiles, 1.86 GHz ULV SL9400 processors – you get the top. The Envy 13 costs $1699 but the MacBook Air is priced at a close $1499 ($1799 for the 2.13 GHz/SSD model) – pretty close huh?
HP hasn’t mentioned anything about disk capacities for the Envy 13 and Envy 15 yet. But comparing the HP Envy 13 and Apple MacBook Air in general, paying $200 superfluous for the HP Envy 13 versus the cheaper Air would get you:
A HDMI port in place of Show Port
1 additional USB port
1 hour of superfluous battery life (5 hours built-in on Air, 6 hours primary battery on Envy)
Ability to add-on a secondary battery to extend battery life to 18 hours
More graphics reminiscence (256 MB Nvidia on Air, 512 MB ATI on Envy)
Option for DDR3 RAM up to 5 GB (Apple locks the Air to 2 GB)
Supposedly better audio quality
Again, the difference between the Envy 13 and MacBook Pro is too large (no pun intended), in my opinion, for a honest comparison to be carried out. There’s no way HP may possibly’ve fit in better/more components into the Envy.
I don’t have the Envy 13 in person but I do have a Pavilion dv2 to get an thought of the Envy’s size.
HP Pavilion dv2 (12 inch screen) = 29.2 x 24.0 x 2.37 cm @ 1.70 kg
The dv2 is thinner than the MacBook Pro 13, and in turn, the Envy 13 is even slimmer than the dv2. So imagine that, HP had to do use some really compact components and a lot of design plotting to make the Envy 13 as capable as it is now. Hence the premium price.
If you’re still complaining about the HP Envy 13 being more expensive than the Apple MacBook Pro 13, do yourself (and Apple) a favor by also complaining about how the MacBook Air is pricier than the MacBook Pro. After all, the Envy 13 is the Windows cousin to the MacBook Air. The MacBook Pro 13 is a whole different creature.
Disclaimer: In no way is this article an anti-Apple or pro-HP post. I merely stating my observation on how people are comparing the HP Envy 13 to the incorrect notebook. It should be HP Envy 13 vs Apple MacBook Air, because, again, the MacBook Pro 13 is a different class of notebook compared to the Envy.