HP ProBook 5330m review

We always ought to chuckle when laptop makers discuss making business systems look more palatable to the workers toting ‘em. In any case, it is not like we are going to walk off the job because we do not just like the looks of that black box we’ve been assigned. Or are we? Nonetheless, laptop manufacturers are going out in their technique to make their corporate systems look (and perform) more consistent with their sexier consumer cousins. Take the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 , for example, a slimmed-down version of the company’s signature design — updated with a buttonless touchpad, Dolby sound, and a miles-maligned glossy display. Toshiba, meanwhile, recently revamped its line of commercial notebooks to appear just like the lightweight Portege R705 — also a crossover hit.

Which brings us to the HP ProBook 5330m. This 13.3-incher has a metal-clad body and Beats Audio — a primary on an HP business machine, but a staple across its consumer stable. And yet, the company’s wooing the IT guys, too, with a matte display, optional prepaid mobile broadband, Intel vPro technology, and TPM circuitry. With a starting price of $799, it scores big points for value, but can it hang? Let’s discover.

Feel and look

We’ll be honest: after spending a couple of minutes with the 5330m back in April, we came away with the visceral feeling that its two-tone keyboard deck, beige trackpad, and boxy shape weren’t particularly sexy — not to mention youthful. And also you know what? We still do not believe it’s youthful, per se, but after every week of testing, we are able to a minimum of appreciate what a well-made machine it’s.

a huge a part of that, in fact, is the materials used. Except the ground, the chassis and the hinge are both fashioned out of strong aluminum. As for the bottom, it’s fabricated from magnesium, whereas even some high-end notebooks revert to plastic and it has a soft, rubbery finish. The lowest also looks clean, with a pop-out door housing the removable battery (you will need to whip out your Phillips screwdriver to swap the hard disk or add RAM).

It’s too bad, then, that this laptop that tries so hard to be hip still manages to appear dated. Our big bone of contention has always been the strip of matte aluminum ringing the keyboard deck and palm rest. The contrast between the brushed and smooth metals and the sunshine and darker greys is one busy combo, and makes the keyboard deck seem more cramped than it’s. However HP had opted for a completely brushed aluminum chassis (because it has with past ProBooks), the 5330m would have still looked the a part of a major business laptop, only more elegant than the single we’re watching. Ultimately, clearly, it comes all the way down to perception (or spin, perhaps). An HP rep described the look as “timeless.” We are saying it’s stodgy.

Also, one last gripe that’s neither here nor there: what’s up with the gratuitous Beats Audio branding? You can find the logos painted at the upper-right hand corner of the bezel, in addition to front fringe of the notebook — both stinging annoyances because you can’t do anything to take away them. And yes, we all know what number of of you guys feel about stickers, but when HP has some contractual obligation to advertise the hell out of its partnership with Dr. Dre, at the least use a medium people can get rid of when they unbox the laptop.

These quibbles aside, we were pleasantly surprised by how lightweight the 5330m is. Given its boxy 0.99-inch thick profile, we wouldn’t blame you in the event you guessed this thing felt heavy. Indeed, at 3.99 pounds it weighs greater than the three.7-pound ThinkPad X1, though the wedge-shaped X1 is considerably thicker at its chunkiest point. In reality, the 5330m’s heft means it’ll feel more grounded whilst you use it for your lap. Not that the X1 ever slipped off while we were typing, needless to say; it’s just that the 5330m has a more reassuring weight distribution. And, since the 5330m is narrower (12.9 inches across, in comparison with the X1′s 13.3), it’s easier to grip with one hand.

The 5330m’s port list includes three USB 2.0 ports, including one which doubles as an eSATA connector. It also has a fingerprint reader, HDMI and VGA-out, an Ethernet jack, a Kensington lock slot, an SD / MMC memory card slot, and a combined headphone / mic port. Missing, oddly, is USB 3.0, a feature HP says it’s reserving for its higher-end EliteBook series (for now, at the least). It is a shame — this may were a sweet, sensible addition, particularly from a productivity standpoint.

The laptop also has a 720p webcam, which delivers bright picture quality with balanced colors, though as one can find inside the resized still below, images are grainy, regardless of ample lighting.

Keyboard and touchpad

For anyone who’s seen an HP laptop lately, the 5330m’s island keyboard should look familiar. The keys have a soft finish and flat surface — a contrast to Lenovo’s ThinkPads, whose keys have scooped caps. The 5330m’s keys are quieter, but no more precise — they felt sticky, and regularly did not register letters. This brought about missing letters lets have sworn we typed (think “Gmil.com” rather than “Gmail”). The spacing between the keys is good, though, as you may expect with a laptop this size, HP did need to squish the arrow keys to make certain the letter and Shift keys had ample room. Bonus: the 5330m comes standard with a backlit keyboard, which helps enliven that staid design.

Many a time, we’ve knocked HP’s laptops for shipping with flaky touchpads. We’re happy to assert the 5330m gets it right. The touchpad has a smooth, low-friction surface, and two-fingered scrolling works pretty much. Our only complaint is a cosmetic one, that the pad’s taupe color is dreary and doesn’t match the remainder of the system. The buttons, too, are responsive, though they feel a little mushy — just like having trap doors beneath your fingers.

Display and Sound

Blessedly, HP topped off the 13.3-inch (1366 x 768) display with a matte finish, which makes it easy to view from oblique side angles. Still, that may not prevent when you are attempting to watch a film from a plane’s stowaway table — after we tried watching a film with the lid dipped forward, the image looked awfully washed out. As you will see that inside the photo below, colors look pretty accurate (just hone in on Kermie’s skin), though here’s hardly the foremost eye-popping display you will find. Still, its 200-nit brightness helped us work comfortably for long stretches in loads of different situations, including a fluorescent office and a more dimly lit apartment.

The 5330m is HP’s first business laptop to rock Beats Audio, the bass-heavy sound technology that’s becoming ubiquitous within the company’s consumer PCs. As promised, low notes notes stand out in songs reminiscent of “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes, though overall, we enjoyed a more immersive listening experience with the Dolby-equipped X1, whose speakers, by the by, are about as loud.

Performance and graphics

Our $899 system included a 2.5GHz Core i5-2520M CPU, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB 7,200RPM drive, integrated Intel HD graphics, and the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional. Throughout our testing, the machine was in a position to handle whatever we threw at it, including email, blogs, music streaming, YouTube videos, in addition to downloading — and ultimately playing back — an assortment of 720p and 1080p movies. It also manages a 40-second boot time, that is pretty darn fast for a Windows machine.

The laptop has integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics, which somehow doesn’t surprise us a lick. For what it’s worth, though, its score of three,839 at the graphics benchmark 3DMark06 manages to best the similarly spec’d ThinkPad X1. We also saw our World of Warcraft frame rates hovering around a playable 30fps, though that rate occasionally sank as little as 15fps when there has been a plethora of characters running round the screen.

Battery life

The 5330m’s small four-cell battery lasted three hours and twenty-six minutes in our battery rundown test, which involves playing a film off the harddrive time and again with WiFi on and the screen’s brightness set to 65 percent. Typically, we adore to remind readers that that’s a taxing test, and which you might expect longer battery life in case you plan on staying inside your browser. Hence, though, we were on the right track for the same time of 4 hours after we went about our usual routine, such as checking and responding to Gmail messages, reading various blogs, streaming music through Grooveshark, and writing reviews, like this one. After an hour of doing all those things within the cloud, our battery life rating fell 30 percent.

The actual shame here isn’t loads the battery life, because the X1 notched a near-identical score with an analogous processor-graphics card combo. (To be fair, obviously, the low-powered MacBook Air made it nearly five hours, while the Samsung Series 9 came with reference to four and a half.) Rather, we’ve a larger problem with the indisputable fact that this business laptop, of all things, isn’t offered with a longer or slice battery, that’s how Lenovo is compensating for the X1′s less-than-stellar longevity. You should purchase a spare for $129, but it’ll have the identical limited capacity because the battery that incorporates the laptop.

Configuration Options

With this pre-configured $899 model, you’re going to get a Gobi mobile broadband module that supports both EVDO and HSPA. It is usually compatible with HP DataPass, the company’s new contract-less, pay-as-you-go mobile broadband service that piggybacks on Sprint’s network. Alas, the unit HP loaned us is missing that module, so we weren’t ready to test 4G performance. For now, we will say with confidence that we adore the basis of DataPass, and are all about people getting 3G radios built into their sub-$1,000 laptops.

For $100 less, there’s another pre-built configuration with each of the same specs, except it has a 2.1GHz Core i3-2310M CPU. You too can get a configurable version, though these start at $1,433. If you are building your personal, you can still expand to 8GB of RAM ($200), select a 128GB SSD ($225), and get that 3G radio for $124.

Software

As well as some benign bloatware (e.g., Microsoft Office, Norton Internet Security), the 5330m comes loaded with various HP-branded utilities, including the newly enhanced security package, HP ProtectTools. This includes drive encryption, for one, together with tools to configure TPM and your fingerprint reader. We’re still fans of Spare Key, a utility that permits you to answer security inquiries to find your way into the pc within the event that you have forgotten your password. And this is often all great. We just wish these tools were rather less invasive; HP’s panoply of well-meaning tools pops up an awful lot greater than Lenovo’s similar ThinkVantage suite does.

Like other HP business laptops, the 5330m comes loaded with QuickWeb, and instant on browser that you’ll launch using a dedicated button that sits above the keyboard, next to the facility key. If the computer’s been powered down, you are able to expect the browser to load in about 12 seconds, at which point you will see a browser built on Firefox, together with loads of easily customizable “tiles” — a comparatively new addition we’d opt to describe as widgets. With these, that you could glance at CNN and BBC headlines, weather, stock prices, and Twitter (our personal favorite) when you find yourself not using the browser. It’s true, your smartphone probably offers all this within the sort of glanceable tidbits, too, but when QuickWeb is all about helping you get out and in if you happen to shouldn’t have much time to surf, it’s nice not to ought to navigate to Twitter.com, weather.com, or some such.

Wrap-up

The ProBook 5330m’s a hell of a laptop for what you’ll probably pay: even though you choose for the bottom-end, $799 pre-configured model, you will get an encrypted 7,200RPM drive, 3G radio, and fingerprint reader. And though we will not promise its design would be your cup of tea, it’s lightweight enough for travel and built from high-quality materials, as well. The only thing you can not expect is long battery life, because of that small four-cell and a dearth of any additional battery options. It just doesn’t make sense for a skinny-and-light system that otherwise makes quite a bit sense for business travel. Because of this and others (namely, the keyboard), we’d recommend the ThinkPad X1 for those that can afford the $1,349 starting price. But if it involves sheer value, the 5330m gets high marks.

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This post is tagged: business machine, business notebooks, business systems, intel vpro technology, laptop manufacturers, line of business, phillips screwdriver