Recently bought this laptop.
Did not really need a touch based laptop, but ended up buying it.
For reading documents or power point slides , the touch is helping more than I thought. I am able to pinch and zoom , roll over pages easily. I see the touch mainly as a mouse based screen and a little more. Gaming and paint brush kind of applications will be good to use , though I have not and may not.
The display is good but not as brilliant as my Macbook pro.
The HP laptops as I see the 'Envy' series seem to strike a middle ground between the purely tablet and purely laptop space with the touch and the key board. By having both, with less weight, and smaller screen sizes, you have a better world to manage. Especially if you are the coding kinds who keeps typing away or even the document kinds. I still don't see the soft key board on the screen as a friendly thing for typing docs or power points. One good thing about this HP laptop is it does not get heated up. The key board is sleek and similar to the Macs. I guess HP is towing the Samsung way in trying to take the Apple's position on their laptops. However, I would still any day prefer a Mac for the integrated and thoughtful UI experience.
Coming to Windows 8, Its definitely a try I would say to get into a tile based UI. But alas, you still have the old windows desktop which keeps popping windows when you do something on a tile app. For example, when I use the tile bing and search youtube and click, it goes to the Internet explorer window to open youtube. Crazy!
Same when I use the Office 2013 power point, it seem to have a fresh new interface showing the file properties and all metadata. However when I click Save As , it opens up a window which is the old browse window to save your files. The experience is divided between the new interface and old interface. I get annoyed with the windows popping up experience after I started using Mac which has managed it more as Apps and it still has some minor pop-ups, but not in the scale of Windows.
The workspace concept by swiping your finger from left of the screen to switch across the different apps you are using (similar to alt tab) is good.
But I feel Microsoft should move away from their pop up windows and all changes to a screen should happen within the screen. I know they have a lot of smart engineers who can do this.
Did not really need a touch based laptop, but ended up buying it.
For reading documents or power point slides , the touch is helping more than I thought. I am able to pinch and zoom , roll over pages easily. I see the touch mainly as a mouse based screen and a little more. Gaming and paint brush kind of applications will be good to use , though I have not and may not.
The display is good but not as brilliant as my Macbook pro.
The HP laptops as I see the 'Envy' series seem to strike a middle ground between the purely tablet and purely laptop space with the touch and the key board. By having both, with less weight, and smaller screen sizes, you have a better world to manage. Especially if you are the coding kinds who keeps typing away or even the document kinds. I still don't see the soft key board on the screen as a friendly thing for typing docs or power points. One good thing about this HP laptop is it does not get heated up. The key board is sleek and similar to the Macs. I guess HP is towing the Samsung way in trying to take the Apple's position on their laptops. However, I would still any day prefer a Mac for the integrated and thoughtful UI experience.
Coming to Windows 8, Its definitely a try I would say to get into a tile based UI. But alas, you still have the old windows desktop which keeps popping windows when you do something on a tile app. For example, when I use the tile bing and search youtube and click, it goes to the Internet explorer window to open youtube. Crazy!
Same when I use the Office 2013 power point, it seem to have a fresh new interface showing the file properties and all metadata. However when I click Save As , it opens up a window which is the old browse window to save your files. The experience is divided between the new interface and old interface. I get annoyed with the windows popping up experience after I started using Mac which has managed it more as Apps and it still has some minor pop-ups, but not in the scale of Windows.
The workspace concept by swiping your finger from left of the screen to switch across the different apps you are using (similar to alt tab) is good.
But I feel Microsoft should move away from their pop up windows and all changes to a screen should happen within the screen. I know they have a lot of smart engineers who can do this.
