CoolNewStuff

HP’s high-end Envy line of laptops is one of the few bright spots for laptop design in an industry currently filled with midprice plastic boxes. With a solidly built (but slightly too heavy) aluminum and magnesium chassis and a capable collection of components, we liked the original 13- and 15-inch versions of the Envy, but they were priced out of reach for most.

The new 14-inch Envy 14 (we always love logical product names) adds discrete graphics to last year’s Envy 13, while dropping the starting price by about one third to $999. That gets you an Intel Core i3 CPU, but upgrading to a more powerful Core i5, as in our review unit, only bumps the price up to $1,049 (Core i7 and quad-core options are also available, at prices up to $1,600).

The 350nit display has a higher color gamut than other displays, and you notice the difference upon first boot — even the blue of the Windows Start button sticks out more than on other screens.

That sweet visual experience is met with an equally awesome audio experience. To start, the speakers on the front edge of the laptop are seriously loud and full.

The processor and RAM alone pushed out some of the best benchmark scores we’ve seen in quite a while, which translated to very zippy everyday performance. Not only was the system extremely adept at handling our usual application load simultaneously – including Firefox, TweetDeck, Trillian, Microsoft Office, and Skype – but when we threw in Photoshop to edit a few pictures it didn’t flinch or slow down.

ATI’s Radeon HD 5650 also topped a lot of the other laptops on 3DMark06. With its 1GB of VRAM, it pushed along a 1080p clip beautifully – though Intel’s integrated solution is more than capable of dealing with HD content.

The Envy 14 looks great and generally runs great, but there are also a handful of minor frustrating issues that seem out of place on a high-end laptop. Using the volume control buttons automatically brings up an on-screen volume bar that bumps you out of full-screen games; the multitouch touch pad still has trouble with its two-finger scroll functions; and this laptop had occasional trouble waking up out of a sleep state–more so than we’ve seen in a Windows 7 laptop in some time.

The Envy 14′s 3800mAh eight-cell battery lasted three hours and 51 minutes on our video rundown test, which loops the same standard definition video at 65 brightness. For a laptop of this size, that’s not bad by any standard.

Like last year’s Envy 13, the new HP Envy 14 is made of aluminum and magnesium, and comes in basic gunmetal gray. The same subtle pattern of imprinted squares covers the wrist rest and back of the lid, making the two systems hard to tell apart, aside from the slight size increase to accommodate the 14-inch display.

The interior consists of a slightly sunken keyboard tray, with a keyboard made up of widely spaced, flat-topped keys and a single power button.