HP Envy 17 Leap Motion Series

Full marks to HP for attempting to do something different with the new Envy 17. However, gesture-recognition is still in its infancy and there are few apps that currently use that technology in a way that grabs the imagination. The Envy 17 Leap Motion SE might appeal to a few niche markets at the moment, but at well over £1000 it will probably seem like an expensive luxury for ordinary home and business users.

Leap Motion’s gesture control technology sounds impressive but doesn’t deliver thanks to a lack of consistency and accuracy. Elsewhere, it’s a mixed bag: fast but hampered by high heat and noise levels, with middling battery life, a good keyboard, and a decent screen.

If you're in the market for a 17-inch laptop, you probably aren't planning on carrying it around wherever you go. The HP Envy TouchSmart 17 is an ideal companion for those types of consumers. Throughout testing, this $999.99 rig surprised me. I didn't...

The Good: You can get the 4th generation Intel Core i7 4900 running at 2.8GHz. It's got the horsepower to handle most anything you want to do. Just be sure to get the NVIDIA GeForce GT740M for graphics. The native Intel chipset just isn't up to anything...

The HP Envy 17 is a top quality laptop with a fine screen and plenty of power for even the most demanding of desktop replacement tasks. But while the 3D motion sensor is a pretty cool party trick, in its current incarnation it's more of a look-at-me...

HP's multimedia powerhouse HP Envy 17 may have changed its face, but its character stays the same. The CPU downgrade from 47 to 37 watts is barely an issue in terms of performance. Quite the opposite, as the GT 750M replacing the GT 740M actually yields...

HP's home for Haswell is more of a mansion than a weekend getaway, with plenty of room for...

HP's Envy 17 is a big notebook that's suitable as a desktop replacement computer. It has a fourth-generation Intel Core i7 CPU, discrete NVIDIA graphics, and it can be used for almost any mainstream computing task. For the asking price, though, it could...