HP Envy 13 - 2016

We were able to squeeze decent hours of battery on the HP Envy 13. It gave us 7 hours of battery life under regular use that included a bit of gaming and work, with Wi-Fi turned on. Overall, we were quite happy with the experience. Yes, the keyboard and sound could have been better, but we soon forgot about it with the extreme performance it gave us.

HP's Envy 13 is a pretty good notebook, but why settle for good? Dell, Lenovo, and even HP sell better thin-and-light laptops.

Ultrabooks rule! HP's half-inch-thin magnesium and aluminum machine looks good and is priced right for anyone who doesn't need a 2-in-1 hybrid.

We were wowed by the thinness, responsiveness and overall design. However, a few niggles such as the touchpad, odd-shaped Enter key and disappointing battery life prevented this laptop from scoring higher.

HP’s Envy 13 is a good laptop, but not good enough to enter that top tier of Windows Ultrabooks. It offers good performance, a nice screen, and the price isn’t bad. But Asus’ UX305C offers double the storage, a slightly better keyboard, much better battery life, and similar screen options for $100 less. You do give up a fair amount of CPU and GPU performance with the Asus laptop, and the HP laptop’s fingerprint reader is nice, but it’s fast enough for most things, and it’s fanless, which is nice.

The HP Envy 13-d000ng is an average device when you just look at the test results. Its QHD panel stands out from the masses, but does not set any records (even though the high sRGB coverage and the low color deviations are good). The performance benchmarks are within the expectations, only the integrated SSD seems to be slightly behind its possibilities. However, the impression is a bit different in practice.

The HP Envy 13t-d000 is a gorgeous and very thin and light laptop, but its short battery life is a deal breaker.