Thursday, June 23, 2011

HP ProBook 5330m notebook pc review

HP can go ahead and call its new 13.3-inch ProBook 5330m a business laptop but we’re going to call a spade a spade — it’s a killer laptop even for those that don’t own a business suit. And well, a glance at the picture above should give you a pretty good idea of why we feel that way. The brand new brushed-aluminum chassis feels solid to the bone — the bottom is made of magnesium alloy — and it’s two-tone color scheme makes it a bit more daring than the other aluminum laptops out there. On top of that, the .99-inch thick / 3.99-pound machine has a beautiful backlit chiclet keyboard, an HD webcam, and Beats Audio enhanced speakers. You see why we’re thinking this is one is a bit more living room than boardroom? It’s also one of HP’s first DataPass 3G enabled laptops — jump past the break for the details and some hands-on impressions / shots!

HP ProBook 5330m bring the look of HP EliteBook Premium business systems, but hews closer to the more budget-minded ProBook S-Series. brushed aluminum lid is decorated with elegant HP logo and the cover and the pages will continue to look metallic. Smooth, soft to touch base incorporates an elegant setting.

Like other HP business laptops, the 5330m comes loaded with QuickWeb, and instant on browser that you’ll launch using a dedicated button that sits above the keyboard, next to the facility key. If the computer’s been powered down, you are able to expect the browser to load in about 12 seconds, at which point you will see a browser built on Firefox, together with loads of easily customizable “tiles” — a comparatively new addition we’d opt to describe as widgets. With these, that you could glance at CNN and BBC headlines, weather, stock prices, and Twitter (our personal favorite) when you find yourself not using the browser.

The HP ProBook is a great alternative for the Apple MacBook Air, in fact it may even be better, if you compare its Intel Sandy Bridge full-voltage dual core processor to the very dated Core 2 Duo low voltage processor of the Apple MacBook. Also the HP ProBook 5330m battery has a backlit keyboard and proprietary flash storage, unlike the Apple MacBook.

The 5330m is a whole lot more such as the MacBook oxygen in some cases, since it includes a 13.3-inch show and have been produced from metal. However, the $799 beginning cost indicates how the notebook can be lacking in some essential areas. The layout has left a entire lot to get desired, so we do not think that Apple need to be concerned about that aspect of things.

The HP ProBook 5330m has a standard set of ports with no surprises. On the right side are a headphone jack, two USB 2.0 ports, and an Ethernet jack. On the right are a Kensington lock slot, VGA out, HDMI out, an SD card reader, and a USB/ eSATA port for a total of three USB ports overall. We wish HP provided at least one USB 3.0 port for higher speed connections, but most notebooks still lack this next-gen connection.

Another innovative feature of the HP Probook 5330m is the wireless solution HP has come up with: a pay as you go solution called HP Datapass. With this feature HP ProBook 5330m ac adapter users can buy bandwidth directly from HP, without having to subscribe to a contract. The advantage of this is that it is not necessary for the company or the user to subscribe to yet another wireless deal. Pricing for the wireless bandwidth starts at $5.

The 5330m comes with a 13.3-inch, 1366 x 768, display. It also comes with a matte finish, which makes it easy to view the screen from various side angles. Although colors appear very much accurate, the display is nothing to write home to. Some users may find the 200-nit brightness useful in working comfortably on the screen.

The ProBook 5330m's a hell of a laptop for what you'll likely pay: even if you opt for the lowest-end, $799 pre-configured model, you'll get an encrypted 7,200RPM drive, 3G radio, and fingerprint reader. And though we can't promise its design will be your cup of tea, it is lightweight enough for travel and built from high-quality materials, to boot.

ProBooks have a come long way, given that just a few years ago they didn’t use metal in their designs. The 5330m is completely clad in brushed aluminum. It’s a two-tone design, using a platinum trim to surround a darker, silvery tone. Ideal for the road, the 5330m tips the scales at 3.9 pounds and fits easily in a small bag.

HP ProBook 5330m power adapter is a powerful business laptop which qualifies all the quality of a gorgeous business laptop as it is eye catchy, light weight, thin and amazingly portable. Apart from good powerful specs, it features technologies like Fingerprint Sensor, HP Beats Audio, gesture support to Touchpad and much much more.

The ProBook 5330m comes packed with plenty of features. For security purposes, there's HP ProtectTools, which as the name implies, protects your computer from unauthorized access. You're able to log in via a standard password or the more complicated fingerprint scanner and facial recognition process, provided you take time to set them up.

The system includes a 2.5GHz Core i5-2520M CPU, 4GB RAM, 500GB with 7,200 RPM drive, integrated Intel HD graphics, and a 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional. The machine is capable of handling whatever we do email, blog, streams music, YouTube videos, and downloading and playing a 720p and 1080p videos. it got some 40 seconds boot time, somewhat fast for a Windows machine. The integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics is really worth, it scores a benchmark of 3,389 on 3DMark06 manages well.

There’s also support for ‘business’ security features such as TPM and Intel vPro. The HP ProBook 5330m basically screams “bring it on [insert competitor with ultra-thin notebook here]“, while giving its own cousin, the HP EliteBook 2560p, a run for its money and looks (In fact I’m surprised HP didn’t rebrand this as the EliteBook 2660p or something!).

So how does this all seem to work? Well, HP obviously didn’t go and buy its own spectrum and start its own wireless network. Instead, it’s relying on a company called Peregrine Network, which resells white-label pay-as-you-go service to device manufacturers. The laptops we saw were connected to Sprint’s 3G network, but since HP’s systems can be outfitted with the hybrid CDMA / GSM Qualcomm Gobi chipset for connectivity, Peregrine and HP can buy wholesale capacity on any of the major networks — and indeed, HP hinted there would be more partnerships to come. Interestingly, according to the terms of service agreement, Peregrine will handle both the billing and customer support for HP DataPass customers.

In our tests, the HP ProBook 5330m's 3.3 x 1.6-inch touchpad provided very smooth and accurate navigation around the desktop without any jumpiness. Multitouch gestures such as pinch-to-zoom were also smooth, and we appreciated the strong tactile feedback from the two discrete mouse buttons.

HP's website boasts that the HP ProBook 4525s battery life on this guy is up to 5 hours and 45 minutes. After moderate use for three hours of web browsing and YouTube, I got the battery down to about 30%, so you can expect to use it reliably for a little longer than that.

The 5330m's small four-cell HP ProBook 5330m battery lasted three hours and twenty-six minutes in our battery rundown test, which involves playing a movie off the hard drive over and over with WiFi on and the screen's brightness set to 65 percent. Typically, we like to remind readers that that's a taxing test, and that you might expect longer battery life if you plan on staying inside your browser. In this case, though, we were on track for a similar time of four hours when we went about our usual routine, which includes checking and responding to Gmail messages, reading various blogs, streaming music through Grooveshark, and writing reviews, like this one. After an hour of doing all those things in the cloud, our battery life rating fell 30 percent.

Specs:
  • Intel Sandy Bridge full-voltage dual core processors: i3, i5 and i7 second generation;
  • 13.3-inch matt anti-glare display and 1366×768px resolution;
  • 0.99 inches thick;
  • Weight: 3.9 pounds;
  • 2GB RAM;
  • 3 USB Port;
  • VGA web cam and media card slots;
  • Intel Integrated Graphics HD3000;
  • Two DDR3 1333 MHz RAM slots;
  • up to 8 GB of memory;
  • 2.5 inch user-accessible storage bay lets you select between a 500 GB hard disk or 128 GB solid state drive from HP ;
  • “Beats Audio” branding for the notebook’s speakers;
  • Full-sized backlit chiclet style keyboard;
  • Big multi-touch trackpad with dedicated left and right click buttons;
  • Removable/replaceable 4 cell battery giving you about 4 hours batterylife.

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