HP Folio 13 Ultrabook official: starts at $900 with a 128GB SSD and backlit keyboard (hands-on)

And similar to that, HP joined the Ultrabook party. After announcing the Folio in Australia yesterday, the corporate went and made it official here within the states too. And man, can we get the sensation the outfit’s been watching the contest very closely: this guy starts at $900 and springs standard with a 128GB mSATA SSD and a backlit keyboard. Provided it comes nearly matching its promise of nine hours of battery life, it is able to give the identically priced Toshiba Portege Z830 a run for its money. Let alone, it undercuts the MacBook Air ($1,299 and up), together with the ASUS Zenbook UX31 and Lenovo IdeaPad U300s , either one of which start at $1,100 with a 128GB SSD and no backlit keyboard. Good on ya, HP.

What’s that, you assert? You would like more specs? Rounding out the list, the Folio has a 13.3-inch (1366 x 768) display, optional TPM circuitry and is derived standard with a Core i5-2467M processor, 4GB of RAM, a six-cell battery and HP’s CoolSense technology. Additionally, it offers a pretty robust choice of ports, including HDMI, Ethernet, USB 2.0 and three.0, a memory card reader and a combined headphone / mic socket. The trade-off, though, is a touch thicker chassis than what other Ultrabooks are offering: 3.3 pounds and 18mm (0.7 inches) thick. It will be available inside the US starting December 7th, but we’ve already managed to snag a couple of minutes with it, because of this we have got photos, video and impressions with the intention to peek now. So what are you watching for? Meet us after the break for our hands-on preview.

Appear and feel

We’ll get this out of ways early: at 3.3 pounds and 18mm thick, the Folio is “chunky” for an Ultrabook, to the level that this type of laptop can really be unwieldy. Perhaps if we held this in a single hand and the two.9-pound UX31 inside the other, we’d feel the variation. But when you’re handling the Folio by itself, what you have got, easily, is a light-weight laptop. Period. What’s more, it’s particularly easy to grip in a single hand, due to the fact the base side is coated in a nice soft-touch material. As for its shape, this feels most a dead ringer for the Aspire S3 in that it has rounded corners and doesn’t taper all the way down to a razer-thin sliver.

Even HP will let you know the Folio might have been skinnier and lighter, but that would have meant skimping on ports. It’s worth repeating that this has a fuller assortment of sockets than quite often anything in the marketplace. For comparison’s sake, the Air has two USB 2.0 ports, Thunderbolt and an SD slot (at the 13-inch model only). The UX31 has USB 3.0 and a couple of.0 ports, in conjunction with mini-HDMI and mini-VGA ports (it comes with VGA and Ethernet adapters). The 1 U300s 1 has USB 3.0 and HDMI. Up to now, the 2 Portege Z830 2 is the sole other model with USB 3.0, HDMI and Ethernet and — unfortunately for HP — it weighs a scant 2.5 pounds.

Particularly when you lift the lid, it’s clear that HP cut some corners to hit that $900 price point, that’s very nearly an analogous thing we needed to say in regards to the identically priced S3. Mainly, we’re talking concerning the undeniable fact that HP opted for plain, plastic keys rather than an all-metal ‘board just like the one ASUS utilized in its Zenbooks. Still, if we’re pitting one $899 Ultrabook against the alternative in a beauty contest, the Folio handily trumps the S3 (let alone, the dated-looking Z830). Whereas the S3 has a split personality (metal at the outside, plastic under the lid), the Folio has a brushed metal lid with an identical palm rest and keyboard deck. In reality, it’s almost entirely made up of metal, save for the lowest. What’s more, the Folio’s deck is nearly entirely with out buttons and branding, which provides it a tasteful, if somewhat spartan look.

In our brief hands-on, the keys exhibited some bounce while we typed, and so far we’re cautiously optimistic that they won’t be as shallow as the Aspire S3 and UX31′s keyboards. At least the panel seems sturdy, though we’ll of course be curious to see how it holds up through hours of furious typing. Moving on, the Folio has a buttonless touchpad with left and right click zones clearly demarcated with a thin line. In general, we prefer to wait until our full review to cast judgment on such things, and in this case we were playing with a pre-production (read: not final) model. So who knows what kind of fine-tuning HP do between now and December 7th? However much it needs to make this thing flawless, we hope.

Display

One of the first things we noticed about the Folio is that the bezels are relatively narrow, at least compared to what you’ll usually see paired with such a common 1366 x 768 display. At first glance, before HP shared any of the specs, we even wondered if we were looking at an 3 LG Shuriken 3 panel, which allows a 14-inch panel to fit in a chassis meant for a 13-inch display. As we got closer to the machine (and got confirmation from HP), we realized it’s not a Shuriken display, but that doesn’t dampen our appreciation for the bezels one bit. As for the viewing angles, well, look at some of our hands-on photos and decide for yourself. Our early take is that they’re on par with what you’d get from other TN displays, which is to say, they’re not great (but not necessarily terrible either).

Outlook

Incredibly, HP is careful to say this the Folio 13 mainly for business customers. It’s almost as if the company is afraid of being pitted against a certain other skinny, aluminum-clad laptop. But if the Folio is as exemplary in practice as it is on paper, then HP might be thinking too small. Based on its design, specs and price alone, it has enormous potential. At this price, we can see it being a hit not just among suits, but the Best Buy-shopping masses.

Still, its performance and ergonomics have the potential to make or break it. For instance, how close does it come to living up to that nine-hour battery life claim? What’s it like typing 5,000 words on that keyboard? And for that matter, how precise will the final trackpad be? And how fast is its SSD compared to the UX31′s SATA III? All questions we’ll just have to tackle in our full review.

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This post is tagged: backlit keyboard, battery life, cell battery, december 7th, impressions, memory card reader, toshiba portege