The HP Envy 15-1110ea laptop is the Windows users' answer to the Apple MacBook Pro.
There’s no disguising the source of HP’s inspiration when designing the HP Envy 15-1110ea – this is the laptop for the Windows user who really wanted a MacBook Pro. It’s metallic chassis houses a similar keyboard and a large buttonless trackpad, while the display sits behind an edge-to-edge glass pane.
Things get a little different when you read the specifications, however. The HP Envy 15-1110ea gets one up on the Apple MacBook Pro with a full-HD (1920x1080) display, and offers Blu-ray playback – plus an extra pair of USB 2.0 ports – albeit using an external optical drive.
The HP Envy 15-1110ea's 1.6GHz Intel Core i7-720QM quad-core processor used here powered the Envy to a very respectable 108-point tally – just a single point below the dual-core Acer Aspire 8942G-526G64Bi.
With four cores to work with, the HP Envy 15-1110ea is in effect the most powerful laptop on test.
HP has selected a powerful ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5830 graphics card with 1GB of video memory for its HP Envy 15-1110ea. Unfortunately, a fair amount of heat is generated as a result of this and the CPU, and this laptop gets really rather warm. This might explain the next departure from Apple’s design – extra cooling vents.
With this amount of energy being dissipated as heat, we didn’t expect to be wowed by the HP Envy 15-1110ea’s battery life result in MobileMark 2007. And we weren’t. The Envy lasted just 150 minutes, which the MacBook Pro beat by two hours even when running Microsoft Windows 7 (as we note in our review, the power-saving properties of its integrated graphics are available only when running Mac OS X).
Other premium features include high-quality sound from a pair of ‘beats’ branded stereo speakers, an infrared-assisted low-light webcam, two fast USB 3.0 ports and a combined USB 2.0/eSATA connector.
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