Hasta La Gadget!

It was just two weeks ago that HP spat out a bunch of new consumer laptops ahead of the holiday shopping season. Now that those products are official, HP is shifting its attention to business customers: the company just unveiled five corporate-friendly notebooks, two of which qualify as Ultrabooks. Starting with the outfit’s higher-end EliteBook line, we’ve got three models: the 12-inch 820, the 14-inch 840 and the 15-inch 850. Like previous generations of EliteBooks, they meet the military’s MIL-SPEC-810G standards for ruggedness, but this time, they’re 40 percent thinner and 28 percent lighter. Across the board, you’re looking at magnesium lids, which have been painted with four coats of paint to minimize scratches; the keyboard deck, meanwhile, is made of aluminum. Speaking of the keyboard area, all three models sport backlit keys, with a special finish applied to the buttons to help keep them fresh over the three-year warranty period.

Interestingly, battery life is the same on all units (up to 12 hours), though the 14-incher, specifically, can be paired with an optional slice battery for a total of 33 hours of juice. On the inside, all of them run Haswell processors, as you’d imagine, though only the 840 and 850 meet Intel’s Ultrabook specification. Once it comes time for your IT guy to configure this, he can get any of the three machines with an optional touchscreen, along with an LTE radio and either an SSD, HDD or hybrid hard drive. As for IT support, these are vPro CPUs, as you’d expect, and there’s also TPM on board for added security. Additionally, as on previous models, the entire back shell is removable with a single latch, making it easy to swap out components. Finally, HP included an all-important Ethernet jack, complete with a drop-down jaw, along with a SmartCard reader, docking connector and legacy VGA port. All are available today with pricing as follows: the 12-inch 820 starts at $859, the 840 goes from $799 ($949 with a touchscreen), and the 850 costs $939.

Filed under: Laptops, HP

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See that laptop up there? Basically, HP has announced something like that every year for we don’t even know how long. It’s always a convertible PC of the traditional sort, one with a fixed screen that swivels around and can fold down into tablet mode. It always supports a mix of pen and finger input. It’s always made of sturdy magnesium alloy. And it’s almost always aimed at businesses.

All that’s true of the EliteBook Revolve, the laptop HP unveiled today and which we’ve so helpfully featured in the photo gallery below. The difference, of course, is that this is the company’s first old-school convertible to run Windows 8, whose finger-friendliness has the potential to change the way we interact with PCs like this. As it happens, you could configure the Revolve with Windows 7 and you could buy an optional pen to go with it, but obviously, if you’d prefer to use your fingers, you’ll have a lot more luck here than you would have with earlier models.

In terms of design, this is indeed made of mag-alloy, with a total weight of three pounds, and it was tested in accordance with the military’s MIL-STD 810G standards. Unlike previous EliteBooks, though, it sports soft, rubbery surfaces instead of the brushed metal we’ve come to expect from HP’s high-end business machines. Lift the lid and you’ll find a backlit keyboard and an 11.6-inch Gorilla Glass screen, with resolution capped at 1,366 x 768. Inside, it has pretty much the exact specs you’d expect to find on any new Ultrabook: up to 256GB of solid-state storage and your choice of Core i3, i5 and i7 CPUs. And though it doesn’t quite make up for the middling resolution, there’s at least an open memory slot, allowing folks to go beyond the standard four gigs. Rounding out the list, this thing has built-in NFC, TPM and a SIM slot supporting LTE in the US and HSPA+ everywhere else. That answers just about everything — everything except for price, anyway. HP says the Revolve won’t actually go on sale until sometime in March, so until then, your guess is as good as ours.

Continue reading HP announces the EliteBook Revolve, a Windows 8 convertible for the business crowd (video)

Filed under: Laptops, HP

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