The rest of the Elite Folio is made from recycled magnesium and is as solid as you’d like, while physical connectivity is limited to two 5Gbits/sec USB-C ports, one on either side of the machine. And, because it’s all one piece and covers both the base and the display, it hides the hinge mechanism that joins the screen mount to the body.īest laptop 2023: The finest Windows, Apple and Chrome OS notebooks On a more positive note, the cover does a good job of looking like leather and makes the Elite Folio appear – when closed at least – more like a book than a laptop. This is one of those idiotic marketing ideas that really grinds my gears: forget the fact that vegan leather is a contradiction in terms, why try to dupe customers with meaningless greenwash when you’re actually using plastic? HP calls the attractive soft-touch covering on the lid and base “vegan leather” when, in fact, it’s just polyurethane plastic. My one problem with the design has more to do with HP’s marketing bods than its designers or engineers. In tablet mode particularly, it looks and feels much less like a laptop that’s been folded the wrong way than most conventional 2-in-1 machines. Despite that, it’s a clever and curiously satisfying design that feels as though it will last. One significant difference between the Acer and HP machines is that the Acer’s display can be used in any position between laptop and tablet, but the HP’s can’t: it just flops about until you position it on the deck and the three magnets in the display engage. Magnets keep everything firmly in place, no matter which position you're in. Tilt the screen further back and you can fold it flat, turning the Elite into a tablet. It looks rather more composed in this form than conventional 2-in-1s, which lack a base when set up like an A-frame or have to rest on their keyboards. Pull the bottom of the screen forward and you can rest it on a lip between the trackpad and the keyboard in a sort of “tent” mode with just the trackpad showing. Open the lid of the Elite and it looks and feels like a regular laptop the difference is that the screen is hinged on a support midway up each side. If that sounds oddly specific it has to be, because other laptops – including the aforementioned HP Spectre Folio 13 and Acer ConceptD 3 Ezel – predate the Folio as the first laptops with “pull-forward” displays. HP describes the Folio Elite as the “world's first pull-forward business convertible PC”. HP Elite Folio review: Design and build quality I have no reason to change my view that it remains one of the best 2-in-1 laptops around. The Lenovo Yoga 9i is also worth a look with models starting at only £1,000 (Core i5, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD) and it, too, comes with a bundled stylus. It’s compact, lightweight and stunning to look at, and comes with a glorious 4K OLED display. HP’s 13.5in Spectre x360 is an absolute masterclass in laptop design, too. When I reviewed this model’s laptop counterpart, the Galaxy Book Pro, I found very little to complain about. If you want a superlight laptop experience in a 2-in-1 format, then Samsung’s Galaxy Book Pro 360 is worth considering. That is not what the HP Elite Folio has been put on this earth to do. So I will have no truck with anyone who buys one and then complains it can’t play games, connect to half a dozen monitors or house a 1TB media collection. HP is pitching the Elite Folio as a machine for the on-the-go business person who prioritises lightness, compactness and long battery life over everything else. HP Elite Folio review: What you need to know It also runs on the ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx chipset, promising several advantages over the usual Intel and AMD x86 platforms, including better battery life and cellular connectivity. That’s not the only unusual thing about the HP Elite Folio, however. The laptop was squarely aimed at consumers, but now HP brings the idea to its Elite range for businesses. Remember the leather-clad HP Spectre Folio 13? That clever 2-in-1 hybrid eschewed the usual 360° hinge in favour of a foldaway screen that offered the twin advantages of reduced thickness and weight.
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