HP EliteBook 2170p Ultraportable Review: Business Class, But Business Savvy?
by Dustin Sklavos on November 30, 2012 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- HP
- EliteBook
- Ivy Bridge
- Laptops
Conclusion: Mixing the Bag
Expectations are strange things. As reviewers we try to be unbiased, but we aren't really immune to being excited about or nervous about a product coming in for review. Consequently, a promising product that turns out to be nearly everything you hoped for can get a fairly glowing review, but a promising product that falls short of expectations can quickly turn into a diplomatic exercise. The surprisingly decent Acer Aspire V5-171 and the HP EliteBook 2170p are two notebooks in the same form factor and performance profile, but they're addressing two very different markets. One of these is better equipped to compromise than the other.
Where HP's EliteBook 2170p generally excels is in durability and flexibility. HP includes all the ports you could really need in an ultraportable, and they back it up with a reasonably solid chassis. It's not quite as firm as the other notebooks in their EliteBook lineup, but that owes to the smaller form factor and generally lighter body. The keyboard is pleasant to use, and though the surface space is limited, the touchpad at least has a comfortable feel to it. I'll almost never turn down a matte finish on a display, either.
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Unfortunately, things go awry when you get down to brass tacks. While HP's support page is actually excellent, featuring a single executable that houses all the drivers for the notebook, performance in practice is less pleasant due to the sluggish mechanical hard drive and lack of at least an SSD cache. Battery life is also stunningly poor with the 4-cell battery. And while I like the aesthetic HP is using for their enterprise notebooks right now, it's utterly ill-suited to an ultraportable like this. This is an ultrabook that's had the fat trimmed off the sides and reattached to the bottom. I'm not talking about weight, either, but actual bulk. The 2170p could and should have been thinner.
I don't think the price tag on the 2170p is that terrible provided the 25% off eCoupon is in place, but I have a hard time really recommending this notebook regardless. That's rough, because HP isn't presently offering a solid alternative to it. The Folio 13 was a pretty solid ultrabook when it was available, but their new Folio is a 14" model and half a pound heavier. What we end up with is the only 11.6" business class notebook that showed up to the party, so if you need something small for business, you're really looking at either the 2170p or going a bit bigger for Dell's XPS 13. The 2170p isn't a bad notebook and the price is reasonable, but a hungry competitor could very easily come in and snatch this market out from under HP if they're not careful.
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Dustin Sklavos - Sunday, December 2, 2012 - link
Brazos netbooks go for a minimum of $400-$450. Brazos should be hitting the same market Atom did, but it's not, and it's encroaching on space occupied by systems with faster Intel chips.Penti - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
I agree that they can't compete against the price point of Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge based Intel chips. Remember those are sub 100 USD chips already. Or barely above 100 USD for low-end Ivy.Hondo, Jaguar core based Kabini or Samara will probably find it's way into some tablets and hybrid tablets, as it's not hard to compete against the price point of those devices though.
AMD's problem is largely that there just isn't any good AMD builds from the OEM's too. For the business segment like this product is geared to there just isn't anything to compete with Intel's full blown vPro/iAMT management solution.
On AMD there isn't even anything to compete with the Core i5 based Acer Aspire V5-171-6422 for 520 USD when it comes to 11.6" notebook. The 17W Trinity is also pretty weak overall. For the same money as they have appeared to be in the market you get Core i5, Ivy based stuff. Even if an AMD solution could hit the 450 mark Core i3's or Pentium/Celeron Intel stuff will be down to about 400.
You end up having something like Samsung NP535U3C compete against a Intel based NP530U3C and the price point between them aren't just gonna matter.
The 300 USD netbook market will just not exist. Except for 300 USD specially rebated notebooks.
AMD needs to get new chips out to compete in this space, as is they also is beaten by last gen Intel chips in price/performance. They obviously need to design a chip that performs well in notebooks and not designed for 4P servers with almost 20MB cache per chip. You can add performance enhancing stuff with L3 cache or whatever but the base performance with minimal amount of cache needs to be good first, it's a general computing processor after all.
batguiide - Sunday, December 9, 2012 - link
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john12345p - Monday, October 14, 2013 - link
You also reviewed HP folio 9470m. Among these two HP 2170p and HP Folio 9470m, which one is ultimately the better one? These are the only two that the IT at work is offering, so need to choose one among the two. Which among these two is better? Which one is ultimately more preferable? Which one ultimately sucks less? :-)HP - Friday, June 27, 2014 - link
I'm not a fan of the new Elitebook series. The previous Elitebook series was better especially in terms of durability and looks -- 6930p, 2540p for reference. The 21/25xx appear over-cooked. The readily accessible internals through the base turns me off slightly. Why should anyone need to get to the internals that quickly? There's not much more to do there once you've done the memory or disk upgrade, which will probably only be one or two times in the usage lifespan of the machine.The machine does indeed feel bulky, rather wide I should say because of the full blown, wide keyboard. Glad I wasn't the only one having misgivings about the new Elitebook series.
nicemachines - Tuesday, November 14, 2017 - link
I bought one for like $140 used on ebay. Come to find out that the upper memory slot doesn't work in mine. I noticed in your pictures that you don't have a memory stick in your upper slot, WTF?