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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DiscoWade - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
It does have one thing going for it: no Windows 8. (Before you start: My hatred for Windows 8 comes from actually using Windows 8.)sigmatau - Saturday, December 1, 2012 - link
So you don't know how to use Windows 8? Got it.greenbackz - Sunday, December 2, 2012 - link
lol.I hated a little bit on win8 when I didn't know how to do much. but not that I've learnt a few tricks here n there.. I'm liking it a lot more than previous windows OS' and definitely much better than OSX.
tayb - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
You meant to say that your hatred for Windows 8 comes from your inability to learn how to use Windows 8.ShieTar - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
Generally speaking, any OS that still needs to be learned is a horrible failure these days. Time spent using the OS instead of your software is already wasted time, but time spent learning how to even use the OS is just inacceptable. GUIs were kind of invented to reduce the need for OS manuals, not as a pretty way of hiding functionality away.afkrotch - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
The problem is when you start adding in more and more functionality. There is no need to constantly display these things in front of your face. So they created a search function. Then they made the search function faster and faster. Win 8, takes no time to search.ajp_anton - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
I was so hoping this would be the resolution, despite the odd numbers, or even a small typo of the resolution...Also I doubt this computer is 265mm thick =).
SodaAnt - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Here's the thing about business laptops. I can accept that some of them are thicker, I have a dell precision m4600, and I accept that its think because it has very good internals, cooling, battery, and upgradability. However, this laptop seems to have none of those things, except maybe good cooling, which isn't really that needed with a ULV chip.Finally, I don't get why they put the i7 in there. To me, it would make much more sense to even put a 512GB SSD in there, which would lead to a much faster laptop overall.
Voldenuit - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
What's preventing the use of a mSATA SSD in the WWAN slot? Is it just that the mounting screw is for half-length cards, or is the slot incompatible with SSDs?arthur449 - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
HP normally employs a whitelist on their UEFI/BIOS for mSATA/mPCIe slots, which means that even if you found an mSATA SSD that fit in the tiny space, it wouldn't work because the UEFI BIOS wasn't explicitly told to allow that particular device.There are ways around that, but it's a stressful process potentially ending in either a bricked laptop, one with curious intermittent problems, or one that works exactly like it should've in the first place.