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Gadget Review: HP Elitebook 865 G10 is perfect for the boardroom and the living room

This computer does a bit of everything with style and panache at an affordable price

You wear many hats. By day you are a head honcho in a corporate boardroom, the controller of the financial fortunes of a business conglomerate, or perhaps on your sprint up the career ladder. By evening you’re a keyboard warrior on social media or a content creator, and by night a serial consumer of entertainment web series. And on the occasional weekend, you’re a binge gamer or an artificial intelligence (AI) artist.

If you answer to these descriptions, as many increasingly do, then what’s common to all these hats you wear is what you carry in your backpack: the tool of choice that lets you tinker in all these domains. The HP Elitebook 865 G10 laptop computer.

If you’ve ever felt the lack of an adequately specced, priced and designed device to match your lifestyle and aspirations in discharging all your diverse roles, HP now has your back with this new laptop.

Let’s start with the looks. If you’re to conquer the boardroom, you need to be suitably dressed and accessorised – and here this new Elitebook will match your sartorial style with its sharp looks by virtue of its smooth, satiny silver finish and its form that looks hewn by the chisel of a master sculptor from a single block of shiny metal. Of course it’s aluminium, but the look and feel, and the finish, has the air of expensive and stylish titanium that instantly grabs eyeballs. This laptop looks as sharp with your Armani attire for that hostile takeover meeting as it looks snazzy with your weekend Levis and New Balance casuals.

And its not just designed for aesthetics but also for function. The large mouse pad has a responsive touch to its ultra smooth surface; the clicks on its two sides for left and right clicking are both reassuring and firm; the black chiclet keyboard is aptly spaced for easy typing and the keys have just the right level of chunk and tactility for reassuring typing; the backlighting of the keyboard is bright without being obtrusive for those who need to type by sight; and the screen hinge just the right level of tight for easy opening and closing while still maintaining any half closed position. And that’s not all: the charger brick is a pebble-esque, rounded-edged design with an added USB charger port for when you also need to juice up your mobile phone while working on your Elitebook, while the power cable is a tough, nylon-braided one, which, like the rest of this package seems built to last.

The form of the Elitebook 865 G10 leads seamlessly to its function. The screen is a large, square 16-incher with 1920 by 1200 pixels of resolution with a 60Hz refresh rate and we thought our test mule performed admirably on the picture front whether viewing HD content, editing photographs, browsing or using any office software. This was, of course, helped by the AMD Ryzen 9 PRO processor, the AMD Radeon 780M graphics adaptor, the 32GB RAM and the 1TB SSD hard drive, all either standard in this class or slightly above what the competitors provide.

In terms of ports and connectivity, there are two USB Type-A ports, an HDMI port, a smart card reader and a SIM card slot with LTE support, which is an interesting addition that very few competitors provide. There are also two USB Type-C ports, which is what is especially needed in this day and age, but sadly, one of them has to double up as the power input because the charger cable ends in a USB Type -C head instead of the usual pin. We felt HP missed a trick here: a dedicated input for the charger cable would have freed up the vital Type-C port for greater connectivity.

The webcam is a decent enough 5MP with infrared that is compatible with Windows Hello, which returned delightfully clear video images with 3,840 by 2,160 capture. The built-in software ensures that the main subject never appears too dark, which can sometimes cause overexposure of certain other areas of the background, but the bundled myHP software allows users to tweak the settings to their liking. When it comes to security, a fingerprint scanner is provided for locking and unlocking, but its set-up and configuration seemed a little cumbersome in our test mule.

A feature that impressed us greatly was the built-in speakers, which are Bang & Olufsen branded and fire downwards from the bottom to amplify the sound by bouncing it against the desktop that the computer is resting on. This makes for excellent, room-filling loudness without losing clarity and musicality. Whenever you want to take a break from those spreadsheets and groove to some relaxing beats, you have a laptop that does the job better than any competitor that we’ve heard in its range at dishing out the music.

Two other features stood out for us: the battery life and quiet operation. Used only for browsing, with a headphone connected to the provided 3.5mm jack for sound output rather than the speaker, and with the screen at mid-brightness, we consistently got over 10 hours on a single charge, sometimes around 13. At max brightness and with the speakers playing, that dropped down to around 6.5, which is still very good in general. And no matter what we used the Elitebook for, there was no fan noise. It was absolutely silent, as if knowing how important it is for the corporate types to concentrate.

Heat management was among our few gripes, with the 865 G10 always running hot, especially closer to the hinge. While this was not a problem for everyday usage when set on a tabletop, you might want to be careful placing it on your lap when using it during transit or travel.

Overall, the HP Elitebook 865 G10 performed more than adequately as an everyday laptop for work and play, whether browsing, watching video content, listening to music, running professional apps or even graphics-heavy basic to medium photo editing. And it did all this in a visually appealing package that adds a certain sense of style to its user. With its competitive and value-for-money Dh2,999 official retail price, you can’t go wrong with this HP if you’re in the market for an everyday laptop in a good-looking package.

HP Elitebook 865 G10 laptop computer

Hits:

Stylish design and finish

Battery life and sound

Value for money

Misses:

Heat management

Not enough ports

Rating: 4 Stars

Price: Dh2,999

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