HP Envy 4-1102TX Ultrabook (Core i5 3rd Gen/4 GB/500 GB 32 GB SSD/Windows 8/2)

Haven't had this ultrabook for long, actually just had a day with a review unit from a private store. But if you choose to take my word, this is THE ULTRABOOK to buy on this side of 60k. I'll start with the pros- Battery life is simply awesome, could extract 5:15 hours out of her with continuous wifi, bluetooth, my iphone sync and charging, web browsing with 3.4gb file download in the background and itunes with either music or a movie playing at all times at 50% brightness! You cannot ask for anything better from anything that has a discreet gpu inside! Will easily last for more than 6 hours under everyday use. Startup times with the ssd are awesome, taking a little more than 15 seconds to boot and not more than 2 from sleep. Application open times are way quicker than standard 5400-rpm drives. Dual booting (my unit had a win8 and backtrack installed) does not have any effect on the load or seek times. For the enthusiasts out there, its got a single 4gb ram chip so the second slot is empty and can be easily upgraded to 8 or 12gb at home (although its upgradable to 16gigs). Gaming scores are pretty good too, giving out 27 frames in synthetic cinebench benchmark. The hd7670 performs better than what i had expected. Battlefield 3 at mid settings is playable at 25-30 fps. Crysis 2, Assassin's Creed Revelation, MW3, GTA4 and NFS: The Run gave identical scores of around 30-35 fps. Fifa 13 and Dirt3 ran at 60+ fps! This translates to all modern games playable at moderate to high settings. The low power ivb i5-3317u actually beats its standard power sibling 3210m in quite a few benchmarks! (That when using less than half the power!) Having the new hm77 intel chipset, it supports sata3 6gb/s. So upgrading to a new 7200rpm hdd or a new sandforce-controlled ssd wouldn't be a problem. The ssd is configured in raid-0 by default to enable intel srt to cache recently used data, but can be used individually by disabling raid from the bios and the os can be installed on it for even quicker boot-ups. I believe the ssd used is the samsung p830 32gb, which i should point out is lightning fast (I couldn't open it to verify though). There are 2 usb3.0 ports and a high-power usb2.0 port which provides about 1000mA charge as compared to standard usb ports which have a max charge of 500mA. It can also charge some usb devices while turned off. Now to the cons of this laptop- - Has the same standard and now becoming annoying 1366x768 screen res. i don't understand why the oem's are still going with this res (and that too on a 14+ inch laptop!) when the 5-inch "ph-ablets" have a full hd display now! Its not unbearable or anything but its nudging everytime when you have to see those blue ray's on this display. It does bleed out at the edges but not noticeably though. And the brightness levels are lower than the samsung and dell counterparts. But at 50% brightness, its more than comfortalble. - no optical drive. Not that anyone wants it really though these days! I'll live without it! - a standard 5400-rpm drive. A 7200-rpm hybrid drive is expected at this price. - i can't understand why do these multinational American cos think its only the people in states that need BACKLIT- KEYBOARDS! We need that little nifty feature too sir! - Comes with windows 8 when the upgrade offer allows you to upgrade to Windows 8 Pro. Not a big difference for general use though. Other than these little niggles, its a great book. The propriety beats audio are good and so is the absolutely fantastic premium aluminium contruction. The base is rubberized red which provides a good grip and absorbs quite some heat to keep your laps cool! The beats audio though are just an equalizer setting and it just improves the already pretty good 2-speaker quality with a subwoofer. I have made this review very long i know but not seeing a single review, i thought i should provide a thorough impression of this notebook. So without any doubt, go buy this ultrabook, you wouldn't be disappointed.

very good product and packaging and in time delivery by Snapdeal is quite amazing. All in all good buying experience