The laptop feels as well-endowed as a decent desktop computer, including pretty good gaming performance and 3D entertainment to boot, while remaining portable. Since is not a notebook and weighs well over 3kg, but you can lug it effortlessly from room to room, whenever the fancy takes you.
The 17.3in LED display is sharp and bright at a wide range of angles, its 1920x1080-pixel resolution allowing it to support full 1080p HD media. To this end, the computer is fitted with a slot-loading Blu-ray player/DVD burner combo drive.
It comes packed with a super fast Intel Core i7-2630Qm 2.0Ghz (Turbo up to 2.9Ghz) processor to blaze through anything you can throw at it, a powerful ATI Radeon 6850M 1GB video card to power through even the most demanding HD videos and games, and impressive 6GB’s of RAM. It includes a large 750Gb hard drive to store everything you need and even a Blu-Ray player and supermulti DVD-DL burner so you can access every bit of media possible.
The Laptop has a full-size keyboard with numeric keypad and a large trackpad (HP calls it a ‘Clickpad’) off-centre to the left in front. The keyboard action is lovely but I found the Clickpad difficult to master: my sharp taps were not always interpreted as clicks in the main area, so I had to keep looking down in order to locate the designated left-and-right click areas instead.
Unlike the almost too regular layout of the Envy 14, the keyboard makes great use of the space on a 17-inch system, with plenty of space between the keys, a logical layout for secondary keys (although it is a long way over to the Home and End keys) and a separate numeric keypad for gaming (although if you're serious about bashing numbers into spreadsheets you'd love this machine as well).
The contrast between the very textured palm rest and the very smooth touchpad is noticeable (so you know the second you're touching it even though it's flush with the pam rest) and the sensitivity is very high.
Most of the connection ports are on the left-hand edge of the case includes two USB ports on the right-hand edge of te sace along with optical a 5-in-one memory card slot, as well as HDMI and VGA connectors, the Envy 17 3D provides a Mini DisplayPort.
The Envy 17 has the slightly slower Core i7-720QM and 6GB of RAM rather than the 740QM and 8GB we're seeing on many gaming laptops and really this is an entertainment system you can use for 3D gaming as well as 3D movies rather than a dedicated gaming rig. Core i7 really comes into its own with demanding software that can use all its cores efficiently but it has plenty of power for any application and the GPU acceleration for photo and video editing and browsers like IE 9 is impressive
The shutter glasses are flicker-free and highly effective, and it is possible to wear a pair of ordinary glasses underneath (no flamboyant frames, though), found them uncomfortable to wear.
The sound quality of the Envy 17 is excellent, although it doesn't match the Asus NX90 and the Dell XPS 15 wihich has sound that's both richer and brighter, but we're not hearing the bombastic bass of the Envy 14 beats edition either. Volume is perhaps a little on the low side but sound doesn't distort at high volumes and you can hear plenty of detail in the music, with strong bass from the subwoofer.
Battery life
Quite average, really. In our standard battery test, which involves playing a movie on repeat with WiFi on and the brightness fixed at 65 percent, the Envy 14's eight-cell lasted three hours and 55 minutes. That's squarely mediocre when you consider the 15-inch VAIO S series lasted a near-identical three hours and 59 minutes with its integrated graphics card enabled, while the Dell XPS 15z made it three hours and 41 minutes with Optimus turned off. The one major exception we've seen lately in this category is the Acer Aspire TimelineX AS5830T, a 15-inch laptop that squeezed out almost six and a half hours of juice. The point is, the Envy 14 should be fine for working on your couch for a few hours, but remember the charger if you're planning on staying out of the house all day.
Pros
- Solidly built, attractive chassis
- Good performance, runs cool
- Comfortable keyboard, improved touchpad
Cons
- Low-resolution display
- No Blu-ray option
- No VGA port
Bottomline
That stunning display just ain't what it used to be, but it's still tough to argue against the Envy 14.
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