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HP’s Envy 4 is a compact Ultrabook with a 14in screen. It retains the same black brushed metal and red rubberised plastic styling, as the rest of the Envy range, giving it a luxurious look and feel.
Open the lid and the monochrome colour scheme continues underneath, with black keyboard tray and metal-effect touchpad. Silver edging around the touchpad cheapens the look a little, but it’s otherwise very easy on the eye. There’s no backlight for the keyboard, but the full size Chiclet-style keys are comfortable to type on thanks to sensible spacing and springy actions that bounce back quickly. HP has re-assigned the function keys to proprietary shortcuts, but they can be disabled through the BIOS so you can use Windows shortcuts more easily.
The touchpad was accurate and responsive too, recognising multi-touch gestures and comfortably navigating the Windows desktop. A double-tap to the top left corner disables it, in case you prefer using a mouse.
The 14in chassis is well matched with a 1,366×768 display, even if it’s a fairly standard TN panel. HP has prioritised colour vibrancy rather than reflection reduction by using a glossy screen finish – it certainly makes images look bright and colourful, but in a bright room or direct sunlight it can be difficult to see what’s on-screen. There’s a reasonable amount of tilt, but poor viewing angles leave little room to manoeuvre. Brightness was only average, making it difficult to spot details in some of our darker test photos.
Sound quality was slightly more impressive. Beats Audio might appeal to a certain demographic, although it’s barely any different to applying an equalizer pre-set in the audio driver, but HP has also paid more attention to its speakers than other Ultrabook manufacturers. A small low frequency speaker produces better bass than the competition, although it’s still lacking compared to a desktop speaker system or pair of headphones.
Even with smaller dimensions, the Envy 4 manages to fit in the same connectivity as the 15in Envy 6: three USB ports, a multi-format card reader, HDMI, Ethernet and twin 3.5mm audio jacks are all present, with two of the USB ports being faster USB3 variants.
The internal components haven’t changed either, suggesting Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors are excellent at dealing with heat. The dual-core i5-3317U runs at 1.7GHz and 2.6GHz using Turbo Boost. The 4GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD cache helped it score a fairly average 39 in our multimedia benchmarks, as well as boot into Windows in around 15 seconds. The 500GB mechanical hard disk still has plenty of room for all your files. Away from the mains, the Envy 4 is just as impressive as its bigger brother. In our light-use test, it managed a sterling eight hours on battery power.
Graphics performance comes from Intel’s HD 4000 processor-integrated GPU. It’s almost capable of playing modern games, although you’ll need to turn down detail settings and disable anti-aliasing – our Dirt 3 test produced 17.9fps.
The Envy 4 costs the same as the larger HP Envy 6, so choosing between the two will depend on whether you want optimum portability or a larger screen. With only minor differences in performance, battery life and usability, it’s really up to personal preference – for that little bit of extra power pick the Envy 6, but for portability choose the Envy 4.
