Laptops HP Folio 13 ultrabook review, Thinness and beauty are considered premium among ultrabook designs, in which case the HP Folio 13 is very much an also-ran. In terms of performance though, it can hold its head up with some of the best.
Design
The brushed aluminium look and squared-off edges give the Folio 13 a functional appearance, certainly not something to encourage your eyes to linger and no rival to HP's glass-tastic Envy 14 Spectre. At 18mm deep, it isn't the slimmest of ultrabooks either, being slightly thicker than a Toshiba Portege Z830. But that industrial look extends to the build quality, which feels sturdy and reliable, with a strong hinge that feels like it will keep going for a very long time indeed.
The brushed aluminium look and squared-off edges give the Folio 13 a functional appearance, certainly not something to encourage your eyes to linger and no rival to HP's glass-tastic Envy 14 Spectre. At 18mm deep, it isn't the slimmest of ultrabooks either, being slightly thicker than a Toshiba Portege Z830. But that industrial look extends to the build quality, which feels sturdy and reliable, with a strong hinge that feels like it will keep going for a very long time indeed.
The metal casing is limited to the top, sides and keyboard deck -- the bottom is plastic, which presumably cuts down on cost and weight, though it also means the Folio 13 is a little less premium than it first appears.
It's not over-endowed with ports, though it has the basics covered and a little bit more: Ethernet, two USB slots (2.0 and 3.0), a combined headphone/microphone jack and even a full-size HDMI port. There's an SD card reader too.
The 13.3-inch screen offers a decent if not exceptional resolution of 1366x768 pixels and HP's BrightView technology ensures that it certainly is, well, bright. That pixel count is perfectly okay, but if you want something sharper, you'd do better to look at something like the Asus Zenbook or Apple's MacBook Air.
The keyboard features LED backlighting and the large black plastic keys are neatly spaced and responsive to the touch. They're made of nicely tactile rubberised plastic too, which makes them nicely grippy. The mousepad is impressively sensitive too, with easy distinction between scrolling area and buttons. It has multitouch capability and you can do two-fingered scrolling and zooming, while with three fingers you can open new webpages and flick forward and back. Four fingers allows you to flip between applications or open the Windows Flip 3D interface.
Performance
Performance-wise, it has the guts to deliver with a 1.6GHz dual-core Core i5-2467M processor backed by 4GB of 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM and a 128GB SSD, as well as Intel's HD 3000 graphics chip.
Performance-wise, it has the guts to deliver with a 1.6GHz dual-core Core i5-2467M processor backed by 4GB of 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM and a 128GB SSD, as well as Intel's HD 3000 graphics chip.
It's no gaming hot rod, but it still delivered a PCMark benchmark rating of 2,957, which puts it above the Zenbook and even, by a hair, Toshiba's pricey Portege Z830. It took 4mins 33secs to encode our test 11-min movie for iTunes, which didn't match up to the Portege, while for gaming it delivered respectable, if not exceptional frame rates around 110-120fps within Portal on default settings.
The battery held up for its quoted five hours of use, which is hard to argue with.
Conclusion
The HP Folio 13 isn't an exceptional ultrabook by any means, but it does deliver a worthwhile spec and performance for a very reasonable £800 -- if you're on a budget, it's well worth considering.
The HP Folio 13 isn't an exceptional ultrabook by any means, but it does deliver a worthwhile spec and performance for a very reasonable £800 -- if you're on a budget, it's well worth considering.
