The last few months of Hewlett-Packard’s ventures have been rocky to say the least, with ups and downs constantly putting the company in a careful balance between thriving with customers and starving for business. This process has been largely due to a changing of upper-management and the rash decisions that followed as we witnessed in their tablet debacle. Today we had the chance to take a first hand look at the new Folio 13, a small but powerful laptop designed towards the so-called ultrabook market. HP is attempting to take back a portion of the market that Apple’s MacBooks and even stronger tablet devices have been controlling this past year. They believe that the all-new Folio has the strong looks and powerful components to be the deceiving factor in this computer fight.
The first attribute we notice when taking a look into the tech specs of the laptop is that it seems to have an identity crisis… what we mean is that the Folio lacks the normal HP branding for consumer level PCs. There is no mention of ‘Beats by Dre’ audio or even intricately designed patterns on the backside of the display, maybe HP is trying to seem more business-like and modern and will be stepping away from the previously used designs. The Folio is thin and light making it perfect for long trips on a plane when space is limited or even better for sitting on a coffee table during a lunch meeting. The Folio 13 comes across just as intended by HP, strong and subtle.
The laptop comes standard with an Intel Core i5 processor and 4 gigs of RAM. These first features are above average when it comes to consumer laptops these days so we are happy to see HP going above and beyond to keep their hardware updated. One of the common problems that users experience when purchasing from large name brands is normally a huge gap between consumer and heavy usage systems, which leaves the middle range of gamers and people looking for slightly stronger machines without another thousand dollar price hike left without any suitable options. Even better, the Folio comes with a 128 gig SSD which should produce blisteringly fast boot up times and amazing general computing. Solid state drives are still a luxury item in high-end desktops so finding one in HP’s more budget oriented laptops makes this a very desirable machine. Even though the main display is only 13.3 inches the Folio still fits in all the normal ports, something that smaller ultrabooks like the MacBook Air will drop in an attempt to save space, and even has a backlit keyboard. When you put all of these factors into play the $899.99 price tag wraps this laptop up nicely and we would be hard-pressed to find a laptop in this range that has anywhere near this amount of performance and value, the Folio 13 is one super hot laptop.
