Combination tablet and laptop, robust locking mechanism, good
looks, good battery life

Underpowered processor, heavy, pricey

The HP Envy x2 gives you the choice of Windows 8 laptop or tablet with a simple clip system. It looks good too, but has it got the power to deliver?

It’s on sale now for around £699.

Design

A vision in brushed aluminium, the Envy x2 looks like a classy bit of kit, the effect only slightly spoiled by the practical, but prosaic-looking rubber feet underneath the keyboard.

It looks like a very swish ultrabook indeed, but pick it up and it feels distressingly heavy at 1.41kg. Open it and you’re faced with an 11.6-inch screen offering an HD resolution of 1,366×768 pixels. Not the very highest available but certainly sharp enough for rewarding video viewing. The brightness didn’t crank up quite as high as we’d have liked however, leading to just a tad too much reflection though it did seem to have nice, wide viewing angles.

There are power and volume buttons on the back of the tablet but the sides are too thin for connectors, so they’re all on the keyboard — two USBs (no 3.0 versions though, only 2.0), HDMI and a microSD memory card slot to augment the 64GB already on board.

The keyboard felt tactile and responsive and typing offered no problems. The large trackpad too was fine, and capable of handling multitouch actions.

A simple switch beneath the screen allows you to detach the tablet. It’s a simple mechanism and works easily with no fiddliness. Equally, it feels secure when it’s in its dock.

However, there’s a bit of an issue with the viewing angle — it won’t go back much beyond about 30 degrees, which won’t feel comfortable for everyone, and in common with many hybrids, it feels a bit top-heavy.

Features and performance

Unusually, there’s a half-decent camera on the back. With eight megapixels, autofocus and an LED flash it’s better equipped than many, and picture quality holds up well in good light, though it soon struggles in less than ideal conditions.

It has Beats Audio sound processing and stereo speakers but don’t expect them to blow your socks off. Without recourse to headphones they sounded tinny and insubstantial.

Unlike most Windows 8 devices we’ve seen so far it’s only the 32-bit version rather than 64-bit. That’s bound to have an impact on performance, especially since the dual-core processor’s only got 2GB of RAM. And sure enough, it’s on the slow side, taking its own sweet time rendering web pages and processing images. Our PC Mark benchmarking test delivered a very mediocre score of 1,410.

Gameplay suffered too and in Portal it averaged frame rates in the very jerky twenties, making HD gaming virtually impossible and transcoding our 11-minute test movie for iTunes took over 13 minutes.

Battery life was impressive however, especially when you use both parts together, delivering just under 13 hours in our battery test. You’ll get around half that with tablet only, which puts it a few hours shy of what you’d expect from an iPad, but it’s still pretty decent.

Conclusion

The HP Envy x2 looks good and offers a neat and effective solution to the laptop-or-tablet conundrum. But its underpowered processor can be frustrating and the price is definitely on the high side for what you get.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK