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When choosing a laptop, it can be overwhelming to see the variety of options from different brands. Sometimes, the fact that a laptop belongs to a specific series helps to orientate you, but there may be atypical representatives there as well.
Today’s laptop comes from the Envy family, which includes desktops, business laptops, and tablet options. Let’s take a closer look at the continuity of the tablet laptop – HP ENVY x360 2-in-1 Laptop13.
Specifications of HP ENVY x360 2-in-1 Laptop13-bf0002ua
We have a stylish office laptop with a 13.3″ screen, 1.38 kg, and an aluminum case. You can feel the cool metal at every touch, and it’s even too much, because in some places you can find sharp corners. Only the bottom removable panel is plastic, but it still feels monolithic. The screen swivels 360 degrees and holds confidently in any position.
The Intel Core i5-1230U processor has 8 energy-efficient cores with a frequency of up to 3.30 GHz and 2 powerful cores with a frequency of up to 4.40 GHz. It is quite cool with a TDP of 9 watts, although it can reach 29 watts in turbo mode. PCMark 10 on the default settings gives 4641 points, and this result is similar to the results of other laptops with this processor.
During the day, the laptop didn’t heat up at all; to actively cool it down, I had to switch it to the “high performance” mode and run two archiving processes with maximum settings. But even in this mode, the laptop heated up evenly and quite moderately. At the warmest point, it was only 20 degrees higher than the overall temperature. Therefore, in everyday use, high temperatures and fan noise are not expected.
KIOXIA’s 512GB drive (KBG50ZNV512G), combined with 16GB of RAM, makes it possible to run many programs without lag or waiting. The drive isn’t the fastest on the market today, with speeds of 3.3 GB/s for reading and 2.7 GB/s for writing, but it’s enough for many tasks. In any case, the drive, unlike RAM, can be replaced.
Interfaces
The compact laptop has more than two USBs, so we have a good set. There are two USB Type-C, each with support for Power Delivery, Thunderbolt 4, and DisplayPort 1.4. On the left side there is a combined headset jack and a micro SD card reader. There are also two USB Type-A ports with a cover that support the USB 3.2 Gen 2 protocol. The shield does not prevent even blind use of the ports, if you practice.
Battery life and charging
The supplied standard-sized power supply has a cable with a rather peculiar and stylish weave. With the native PSU, the laptop receives 65 W via PD 3.0, but when connected to another power supply, the laptop is capricious and reduces its needs to 45 W, even if your PSU can be designed for 100 W and has a corresponding cable with an e-Marker. And this capriciousness would not have been noticeable if a window did not appear at random times asking you to use an HP branded PSU.
As for the battery life. With a light workload, such as browsing the news, the laptop discharged by 10% within an hour, meaning the user has about 10 hours. Installing updates or actively working with documents reduces the battery life to 6 hours. And with a constant and intense workload, you can count on 3 hours.
Multimedia capabilities
The 5 megapixel camera has a decent picture and good light sensitivity, which will help not only to hold conferences but also to look at documents on occasion. It doesn’t indulge in colorful colors, although this is not a significant drawback for business tasks. For comparison, photos were taken at dusk with this camera and the camera of an average laptop.
In addition to the main camera, you can see a light sensor, and for face recognition (Windows Hello is supported), there is a separate IR backlight LED and IR camera.
The main camera has a privacy shutter, but it’s not a simple one, it’s an electromechanical one. Anyone who appreciates increased privacy will appreciate the genius of the idea of allowing the laptop itself to control the shutter.
The speaker system is impressive! Two small standard speakers under the keyboard are capable of delivering a three-dimensional stereo picture even at low volume. These speakers are perfect for listening to music, filling the room with movie sounds, and helping you learn languages with their accurate voice tones. The cooperation with Bang & Olufsen was definitely fruitful.
The touchpad is large, comfortable, and supports multi-touch and gestures. The two corners of the touchpad bend to accommodate left and right keys. The touchscreen is also comfortable to use because of its oleophobic coating. Around the edges of the screen there is a small rubber strip that can be felt to the touch and is designed to protect the screen from the keyboard. An optional HP Pen stylus is supported.
The keyboard is standard for this form factor and does not differ much from competitors’ solutions. The backlighting can be selected as “bright” or “medium”, but it is appropriate only at dusk, because during the day the characters are hard to read because of the silver surface of the keys. The fact that there is a power key among the keys is a conspiracy of the developers, but the other functions are quite useful, namely, the indication of the microphone, speakers and camera.
The Intel AX211 Wi-Fi module has 2×2 antennas and is a fairly modern option, it supports MU-MIMO, can reach channel speeds of up to 2400 Mbps, and has Wi-Fi 6E certification, which means it also works in the 6 GHz band. Wi-Fi also works well in tablet mode. This nuance should be checked on every tablet laptop, because in this mode the lid and antennas are adjacent to the body and the quality of communication via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth can drop significantly. There is no Ethernet in the laptop, but you can confidently have a gigabit connection via Wi-Fi.
Display
The 13″ FullHD screen has an aspect ratio of 16:10. The statement in the specifications about the IPS matrix is puzzling, because the display quality is closer to the OLED version. Very deep black color, which does not depend on the current brightness, and a glossy glass protective surface adds juiciness to the colors. By the way, this surface has an oleophobic coating and collects prints well, just like on a tablet. The picture hardly changes even at a high angle.
The minimum brightness is comfortable for working at night, and in the sun, the maximum brightness can only help indoors. In an open space with sunlight, the gloss of the glass surface adds a lot of glare. The accuracy of color reproduction can only be judged visually due to the lack of the necessary equipment. But, compared to a calibrated monitor, it seems that the display shows about 95% of the sRGB space.
The colors are saturated, beautiful, without the predominance of one shade. After some time of use, other features emerged. From the very beginning, colors could become flatter and more inexpressive on their own. It turned out that this was due to the HP Display Control program, which constantly changed the color scheme in addition to brightness. It was not possible to calm it down, so removing the program from the startup menu stabilized the situation.
Tablet mode
As for the tablet functions, the touch mode is made on a residual basis. The 360-degree lid doesn’t fit the laptop completely. Some stylish milled parts of the case are sharp enough to hold with your hand. The power button is part of the keyboard and you simply cannot turn on the laptop in tablet mode, because in this mode the keyboard is turned off altogether. In fact, the laptop was not designed to be held with one hand, but you can use the tablet mode quite confidently on a table.
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