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HP EliteBook 820 G1

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What's Hot: Removable battery and easily upgradable internals.

What's Not: Mediocre TN display.

Reviewed April 28, 2014 by Lisa Gade, Editor in Chief (twitter: @lisagade)

Business Ultrabooks don't have to be homely. In fact, they don't even have to run Windows 8, if Windows 7 is your company's cup of tea. The HP EliteBook 820 is a good looking Ultrabook that shares a hint of design DNA with HP's attractive consumer Ultrabooks like the Spectre 13. Unlike consumer models, the EliteBook is extremely easy to upgrade--heck it's designed to be opened up for upgrades. No need to fiddle with obscure tiny screws or adhesive strips. It also has more ports than you'll find on the average consumer 12.5" to 13.3" Ultrabook. Even better, while business machines are often priced much higher than consumer models, a decently equipped 820 costs just $874. So what's the catch? Like many business laptops, the screen lacks the boldness and clarity of consumer models, and there's no touch screen on most models (HP does list it as a build to order option). We get the feeling that HP aims the 820 at Windows 7 users, so the lack of a touch screen isn't the end of the world, but we'd love to see better looking displays on business laptops. Since this is a business model, HP includes security features like HP Trust Circles that will only allow assigned contacts access to files on your PC and HP SureStart, which offers BIOS protection and healing. The laptop also has a fingerprint scanner and TPM.

Design and Ergonomics

The EliteBook 820 is a surprisingly attractive Ultrabook with a tapered design, contrasting lid and side colors and a magnesium casing. The laptop passed a number of MIL-STD 810G tests for things like dust, drops and vibrational shock. It feels solid and it should appeal to those who feel that ThinkPads are dull matte black blocks.

Perhaps the most enchanting thing in a sea of similarly spec'd and sealed Ultrabooks is the removable bottom panel. This grants easy access to all internals including the battery, socketed WiFi + Bluetooth card, 2.5" SATA HDD/SSD drive bay, a flash cache slot (optional for HDDs to speed them up) and a WAN card slot. HP offers 3G HSPA+ and 4G LTE broadband cards for $109 and $229 respectively. Even better, there are two RAM slots (most 13.3" and smaller Ultrabook RAM is soldered on board and is thus not upgradable). For do it yourself types and IT departments, this sort of easy repair and upgradeability is rarer than platinum and every bit as valuable. Note that the CPU is still soldered on board, as is the case for most all laptops except some big gaming rigs.

The HP has ample ports by 12.5" laptop standards. It has a VGA port (still popular in business settings where old equipment like VGA projectors hang around forever), a DisplayPort for driving modern, greater than full HD monitors, three USB 3.0 ports (two on the right and one on the left with charging), Ethernet RJ-45, a smart card reader, docking port, SD card slot and a 3.5mm combo headphone-mic jack. The laptop has dedicated buttons for wireless and audio mute above the keyboard.

HP EliteBook 820 Video Review

Display

This isn't the happy part of our review. The display is somewhat washed out and murky compared to today's sharp and clear consumer oriented panels on similarly priced laptops. When you get close to $1,000, we expect lots of clarity and a wide color gamut... something that the Acer Aspire S7 (both generations), HP Spectre 13, Sony Vaio Pro 13 and Flip 13, Dell XPS 12 (often selling for $799 or less) and the Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga and Yoga 2 13" give us. Granted the EliteBook is about $100 cheaper than the $1,000 average for Ultrabooks with great screens, but we do wish that HP offered a good upgrade option. The display resolution is 1366 x 768, and while that might sound low to those accustomed to 1080p Ultrabook screens, for a business laptop I have no complaints: text, graphics and icons are all readable without display scaling and at 12.5", the resolution is perfectly adequate. Viewing angles are limited, but business users might count that as a plus given the privacy it offers, and we love that this is a matte display.

Keyboard and Trackpad

HP makes a good keyboard, though not as good as Lenovo ThinkPads and Dell XPS models in terms of tactile feel. Still, it's more tactile than the Spectre 13 and Sony Vaio laptops, to name a few. This is a standard keyboard with a normal layout and for those who are defecting from ThinkPad land, there's a TrackPoint style eraser stick pointer embedded in the keyboard. The keyboard is water resistant with drain holes and it has very even backlighting. The trackpad is pleasant and predictable and it has mechanical buttons top (for the pointing stick) and bottom (for the trackpad). Those of you who hate the now more common buttonless trackpads will no doubt enjoy HP's more "traditional" trackpad design. We like that the buttons don't require lots of force, as do some buttonless trackpad underlying click mechanisms.

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