HP Envy Touch smart 15-j001tx review:
1) Design and Build Quality: It certainly feels well built. In stark contrast to the thin, light, fragile feel of some ultra books, this is a substantial two and a half KG of weight distributed across 15 inches of solid metal frame. Even so, the whole thing is 1.17 inches thick, so it’s far from grotesquely large.
It resembles the MacBook Pro of old, with an silver metallic coating on the top and keyboard areas, and a thick black bezel around the screen. The underside is a matte black plastic, breaking with the Apple homage (along with the large HP logo where you’d expect the apple to be). The effect is also broken by the off-center touchpad - more of which on later - and the sloped underside of the laptop, backing up the curves elsewhere. I will have a mixed opinion on the design. At one place it is like MacBook Pro, which is good. But making it thick from back and thin from front is something I find odd. But that's just me. Some might like it that way.
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2)
Screen Quality: As I am dealing with a touch laptop for the first time, the additional input is something of a mixed blessing. While it makes navigating Windows 8’s chunky buttons a pleasure, the offset in terms of screen quality is unwelcome. In this case, the screen has a certain grainy, mushy feel to it making the icons appear less sharp than you would expect on a 1,920 x 1,080 display.
On the plus side, the resolution is very good for this size, and the 15.6 inches of space means that the touch interaction works far better than on some smaller Ultra books where you will struggle for accuracy against the smaller screen real estate.
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3) Performance and Gaming: This is an area where you feel that standard 5400 RPM mechanical HDD has created a bottleneck. You need an SSD to take use the full potential of latest generation 4th generation Core i7 processor. It scored 4.9 rating in Windows. But I am convinced the rating will go up once you swap the HDD with SDD.
With GeForce 740, I won't expect high end games like Crysis to be played @ 1080P resolution. However, it is good for medium games. I played NSF MW, it was running smooth.
4) Keyboard: The beauty of a 15-inch laptop is that we get a full size keyboard to play with: numeric keypad and full-sized set of function keys on the top. The backlight looks amazingly cool, specially when you are typing in darkness. It provides the look and feel of a premium keyboard. The only downsize is keyboard FLEX which is a design flaw. But its fine with, as I give feather touch while typing. However when you are typing for long then you can feel the vibration while typing.
5) Battery Life: The battery will last for 3-4 hours with maximum brightness, Wifi and backlight on and volume maximum. I believe the battery should eventually get better with usage and battery conditioning.