Very fast performance, fine screen, Leap Motion technology
Big and heavy, poor battery life
The Envy 17 TouchSmart in 2012 was a pretty impressive beast, but the new version now includes a built-in Leap Motion sensor, which attempts to bring 3D motion control à la Minority Report to laptops and other devices.
Design and features
It's a hefty desktop replacement weighing in at 4.1kg, with a DVD drive on board and a wealth of ports dotted around its chunky sides. The full-HD 17.3-inch screen offers an impressively sharp resolution of 1,920x1,080 pixels and its size and vibrancy offers a genuinely immersive experience whether you're browsing, movie watching or gaming.
Which is all well and good, but what makes the Envy 17 special is that it's the first laptop to offer proper 3D motion control.
Sort of. San Francisco firm Leap Motion has been producing the sensors for a while (you can buy them separately and add them on, for about £70) but the Envy 17 is the first to include one as standard.
The sensor comes in the form of a strip beneath the keyboard and it uses two cameras and three LEDs to track your hand movements -- up, down and across. It's considerably smaller than the standalone version -- HP reckons half the height at 3.5mm high, which makes it practical for inclusion in a (admittedly pretty bulky) laptop.
While it's clearly a very cool idea, in its current incarnation there's not really a great deal you can do with it. There's a range of apps available in the Leap Motion app store, Airspace, and the Envy 17 comes with a bunch preinstalled, including games, painting/drawing stuff and, oddly, the New York Times, which allows you to twirl your fingers to scroll through articles.
It works fairly well, even if it feels like a gimmick, but the games were a struggle since the technology didn't seem to be accurate or reliable enough for intensive play.
Performance
Still, whether you use the Leap Motion tech or not, this is still an impressive machine. The extremely powerful 2.2GHz processor is backed by 12GB Ram and it had the performance to back up the stats.
Our PC Mark benchmark test delivered a score of 6021, the highest we've seen so far. It also translated our 10min test movie in a mere 1 min 34 secs and delivered impressive frame rates while playing portal, regularly hovering around the 297 mark.
Battery life is the Envy 17's Achilles heel however, and it fell well short of the three-hour mark, even when we tried it without the Leap Motion tech, which tends to put an additional strain on the power. A device this size is designed to spend most of its life plugged into the mains but still, we'd have liked a bit more on-the-go capability.
Conclusion
The HP Envy 17 is a top quality laptop with a fine screen and plenty of power for even the most demanding of desktop replacement tasks. But while the 3D motion sensor is a pretty cool party trick, in its current incarnation it's more of a look-at-me gimmick than a practical addition.
Software: Windows 8.1 64-bit
Processor: 2.2GHz Intel Core i7-4702MQ
Memory: 12GB RAM
Display: 17.3in Full HD LED-backlit touch screen (1920 x 1080)
Hard Drive: 1TB
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M
Webcam: 1080p HD, 8 megapixel rear-mounted camera
Wireless: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth
Ports: 4x USB 3.0, 1x HDMI, 1x RJ45, headphone/microphone jack, power connector, SD card slot
Blu-ray player: No
Size: 416x275x33mm
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
