Thinking of getting a new notebook? HP sure hopes so. They’ve got a refreshed lineup (wait, didn’t we just do this) and they want you to buy, buy, buy. The new iterations of their classic Envy and Pavilion lines incorporate the new Sandy Bridge Core processors, but beyond that, the info here is distressingly thin. Let’s see what we can figure out here, starting with the biggest laptop and working our way down.

On a side note, these things all look a little beige to me. Are you seeing that? Either they’re going with “blushed aluminum” or they did these press photos in a different color space or something. I don’t know, maybe I’m crazy.
Envy 17


The new Envy 17 has the new CoolSense tech, which should help it keep… you know, cool. It’s got the new Core proc with its improved integrated graphics, but you can switch to the Radeon 6850M if you want to play a game. The Beats audio system is, they say, superb, but probably only superb as far as laptop speakers go. The screen is 17.3 inches, LED backlit, and it seems to have room for only one hard drive, a 2.5″ one, so that puts it up to 2TB of storage. Available “soon,” price TBD but I’d put it at around $1600, like the current one.

Pavilion dv6 and dv7

New Core CPUs in these as well. Unfortunately they don’t say which ones, not that I’m familiar with all the SKUs off the top of my head. You’ll probably have a choice anyhow. An unspecified Radeon mobile GPU is also in the cards, and if you opt for the dv7, you can get Beats Audio as well. The dv6 will cost $900, the dv7 a grand, and they’re both available on this coming Sunday, the 9th.

That dv7 is looking extremely MacBook Pro-ish, isn’t it?

Pavilion dm1

This one could be nice. It’s less than an inch thick, gets 10 hours of battery, and has the new Fusion “APU” (accelerated processing unit) from AMD, which aims to integrate CPU and GPU. If I’m reading this release correctly, it has a 1080p screen at only 11.6 inches, which… can’t be right. If that’s true, it’s got one of the highest pixel densities on the notebook market. You can get a GPS unit for this thing, too. I’m definitely going to have to review one of these. They’ll start at $450, also available on the 9th.