Review: Battery life and keyboard problems hinder HP Envy 13 Ultrabook

The Asus Zenbook UX305C and Dell XPS 13 are two of our favorite thin-and-light laptops right now, the former because it represents a good value at $700 and the latter because it’s a slick, lightweight machine with plenty of high-end features.

But there’s some room in between those two, and that’s where HP’s Envy 13 comes in. The $799 model includes many of the same specs as the ZenBook we like but throws in a backlit keyboard and full-fledged Core i5 and i7 CPUs. There are a few things about it that keep it from unseating our favorites, but it still offers some appealing features for people unhappy with a few of the UX305C’s tradeoffs.

Look and feel

The Envy 13 is another Ultrabook in the post-MacBook Air mold, so you should already know what you’re getting into: thin and light with respectable but not groundbreaking computing power and few—if any—upgradeable parts.

Specs at a glance: HP Envy 13
Screen	1920×1080 at 13.3" (166 PPI)
OS	Windows 10 x64
CPU	2.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5-6200U (Turbo up to 2.8GHz)
RAM	8GB 1600MHz LPDDR3 (non-upgradeable)
GPU	Intel HD 520 (integrated)
HDD	128GB SATA III solid-state drive
Networking	867Mbps 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0
Ports	3x USB 3.0, HDMI, SD card reader, headphones
Size	12.85" × 8.9" × 0.51" (326.4 mm × 226 mm × 12.95 mm)
Weight	3 lbs (1.36 kg)
Battery	45Whr
Warranty	1 year
Starting price	$849.99
Price as reviewed	$849.99
Other perks	Webcam, lock slot

Dell, Lenovo, Asus, and others all tend to work with a darker color palette in their laptop designs (even Apple uses black keyboards), but the Envy is predominantly silver. With the exception of the display bezel, everything from the lid to the base to the palmrest to the keycaps are all made of uncolored aluminum. The keys and the bezel are both plastic, but the rest of the computer is metal, and it manages to be impressively thin (0.5 inches at its thickest point) while still feeling sturdy.

It may be thin, but the laptop isn’t especially small when compared to the XPS 13. Its screen is bordered by a rather large bezel, roughly comparable to the one Asus is using. There’s a wide, mostly unused strip of space between the top of the keyboard and the bottom of the screen, but on the plus side there’s room for an upward-facing speaker on either side of the keyboard. These get fairly loud without much distortion, and, aside from the customary lack of bass, they actually don't sound half bad.

The 1080p IPS display panel in our base model review unit is also more or less the same as the one in Asus’ UX305 series, right down to the slight backlight bleed along the edges. On the whole, it’s a nice screen, and you can upgrade it to an even nicer 3200×1800 display on HP’s site for an additional $50. Neither display option is a touchscreen, however, so if you’re looking for that feature this laptop might not be for you.

Like the Zenbook, the bottom of the Envy’s lid rests against your desk when fully open, angling the keyboard toward you slightly. Unlike the Zenbook, the Envy has small rubber feet that keep the laptop from sliding around while in this position.

The port selection is good but not great: there’s an SD card reader, a total of three full-size USB 3.0 ports and an HDMI port, but no USB-C or DisplayPort. Strangely, the USB ports feel tight—I really had to pull on USB drives that I had connected to get them out of the system. Lack of DisplayPort also limits the laptop’s support for 4K displays—HDMI can do 4K at a refresh rate of 24Hz, but you need DisplayPort 1.2 or better to drive one at 60Hz. It’s not a deal breaker, but it’s something the XPS and Apple’s MacBook Airs and Pros can do that the Envy can’t.

One thing the Envy has that the UX305C doesn’t is a backlit keyboard. But as we noted when we reviewed HP’s Spectre x360, a white backlight paired with silver keys can actually make visibility worse in some circumstances, minimizing the contrast between the key and the character printed on it. I’d rather have a backlit keyboard than not, but white text on black keys is much more readable (and HP definitely knows this already).

The keyboard itself is mostly fine, readability issues aside. It has shallower key travel than the ZenBook, the XPS 13, or the MacBook Air, but it’s got as much as it needs to have, and the layout and key spacing are both good. My one major gripe would be the full-height left and right arrow keys paired with half-height up and down arrow keys, which at this point seems to be the way keyboard design is headed rather than an exception to the rule. The top row of function keys is smaller than in the otherwise very similar Spectre x360, and while it’s not clear why they’re smaller (there really is a lot of extra space), it doesn’t really make a difference for everyday use.

The wider-than-usual trackpad appears to be the same one used in the Spectre, and, like the keyboard, it’s neither terrible nor at the top of its class. The Microsoft Precision Touchpads used in the Surface’s Type Covers and in the new XPS lineup are the best trackpads you can get on a PC, and HP’s Synaptics-made trackpad is more prone to misreading input. Windows 10’s multifinger trackpad gestures are supported, though sometimes I needed to try more than once to get the computer to recognize them, and two-finger scrolling can be jerky and a bit unpredictable. It’s fine, but that’s as much praise as I can give it.

Another nice value-add is the presence of a fingerprint reader that’s fully compatible with Windows 10’s Windows Hello feature. It’s a simple swipe fingerprint sensor that works reliably well as long as your hands are dry, and Windows 10 makes it easy to register one or more fingers with the device. The more advanced iris scanner feature isn’t available, but smartphones have made fingerprint-based unlocking so commonplace that I’m hoping to see it in more consumer laptops going forward.