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The right side



From the left we have the first stereo speaker, Kensington lock slot, headphones jack, combo eSATA/USB 2.0, 2x USB 2.0, HDMI output and an RJ-45 Ethernet LAN ports.

The left side



From the left we have the DC-in jack for the power supply, followed by a vent. At the far right is the second stereo speaker.

Buttons/Diodes



Above the keyboard you find the power button, which can be configured to boot either Windows or the SplashTop OS if you prefer. This can be done within the control panel in Windows.
There are no diodes, except a small one on the power button.

Keyboard and Touchpad



The keyboard responds very well, and there is generally no flex to speak of. The letters are written in a white font, except for 'æøå' (only an issue if you live in Scandinavia). The keyboard has an issue in the form of its ‘launch buttons’ as seen in the picture below along with the F-keys:



When you for example want to adjust the volume, full-screen applications tend to crash, which is quite a problem in games. This is because HP has made a graphical interface to make things look a little nicer, but this also results in games being crashed.





The touchpad looks very good on the outside, but it does not work all that well. The touchpad incorporates multi-gesture technology which sometimes works alright, but far from optimal. It is particularly hard to navigate with as there are sometimes small ‘jumps’. At other times it simply ceases to respond for a brief duration. All in all, not the best to work with.

Display









The display is a 15.6 inch HD LED 16:9 widescreener, running a native resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. The brightness can be adjusted gradually via the F1 and F2 keys. It tends to suffer quite a bit from glare, but the screen is still reasonably visible.
The backlighting is homogenous, or evenly distributed all over the display. If you view it from the side, the picture is slightly discoloured but still quite crisp. View it from below or above and it is engulfed in brightness.
The panel itself is from AU Optronics and the model is: "B156XW02 V0".

I/Os



As can be seen, most of the ports are on the right side of the computer, which can be a disadvantage if you want to use a mouse with the computer since many of the wires can get in the way.

Special Features

SplashTop OS



SplashTop OS is a secondary operating system made for quickly handling communication applications like Skype, Firefox, Chat etc. It does not exactly look like the picture as HP have their own theme, but the functionality is exactly the same.

Heat emission
The computer is generally quite warm and the fan runs most of the time. However, the fan activity is adjusted according to the chosen Windows power profile, which makes a big difference to the noise.