News - HP Pavilion 10z touch laptop: the first to use AMD Mullins chip

[HEXUS]

But this $249.99 10.1-inch laptop uses the lowest power 1.4GHz dual-core variant.

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[shaithis]

Beefier APU and 15" screen and I may look at replacing my ageing T41.

[crossy]

The HP Pavilion 10z touch laptop is available to purchase direct from HP in the US, it costs $249.99 with free standard shipping.

If a proper currency conversion is done then that is less than £150, even adding £30 VAT it's still a reasonable price for a bottom-of-the-heap netbook.

Wonder if - unlike previous netbooks - because replacing that HDD with a smaller capacity SSD might help the battery life a bit, and would certainly make it feel a bit speedier.

Might even be a decent performer in Ubuntu...

[Jowsey]

Beefier APU then that looks good to me.

[Myss_tree]

That bezel is ginormous.
Why can't someone make a 10" display (slim bezel), backlit keyboard netbook with an all day battery life, even if it has to be a tad large round the girth.

[ZaO]

What do we think of HP laptops around here in general, guys? I just ordered one of these: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?cc=us&dlc=en&docname=c04378008&lc=en&jumpid=reg_r1002_usen_c-001_title_r0001#N46

I haven't owned a laptop in years! Getting rid of my desktop soon. So just wanted a fairly decent little machine to replace it for making music and editing videos (will play a few casual games on it too). I really wanted an Amd setup. And in comparison to all the laptops I looked at (all component brands included), from the catalogue I'm buying from, this looked like the best option for the price.

I normally would go with Asus. As they all the ones I've seen have a decent build quality and spec for their price. But this thing actually looked pretty decent in the pics. Did a bit of looking around the net too. And it seems that HP generally have a pretty good rep.

[this_is_gav]

What do we think of HP laptops around here in general, guys? I just ordered one of these: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?cc=us&dlc=en&docname=c04378008&lc=en&jumpid=reg_r1002_usen_c-001_title_r0001#N46

I haven't owned a laptop in years! Getting rid of my desktop soon. So just wanted a fairly decent little machine to replace it for making music and editing videos (will play a few casual games on it too). I really wanted an Amd setup. And in comparison to all the laptops I looked at (all component brands included), from the catalogue I'm buying from, this looked like the best option for the price.

I normally would go with Asus. As they all the ones I've seen have a decent build quality and spec for their price. But this thing actually looked pretty decent in the pics. Did a bit of looking around the net too. And it seems that HP generally have a pretty good rep.

I'm yet to see an HP laptop in the past half a decade or so where the battery lasts beyond a year before needing replacing. We've 5 year old refurbished Acer laptops where the batteries still last an hour.

It's a shame, as otherwise every aspect of the HP laptops I've seen has been fantastic.

[crossy]

That bezel is ginormous.
Why can't someone make a 10" display (slim bezel), backlit keyboard netbook with an all day battery life, even if it has to be a tad large round the girth.

Engineering a slim bezel is expensive, since you have to use high-strength materials with the accompanying cost increase. This 10z is designed to be as cheap as possible, so it's "Fisher Price" bezels I'm afraid. All the reviews I've seen have been pretty scathing about the battery provision on the 10z - "inadequate" being one of the less abusive summations.

What do we think of HP laptops around here in general, guys? [snipped] I haven't owned a laptop in years! Getting rid of my desktop soon. So just wanted a fairly decent little machine to replace it for making music and editing videos (will play a few casual games on it too). I really wanted an Amd setup. And in comparison to all the laptops I looked at (all component brands included), from the catalogue I'm buying from, this looked like the best option for the price.

I normally would go with Asus. As they all the ones I've seen have a decent build quality and spec for their price. But this thing actually looked pretty decent in the pics. Did a bit of looking around the net too. And it seems that HP generally have a pretty good rep.

(Disclaimer: yes I work for HP, but the opinions expressed here are my own)
HP laptops? Mixed opinions on those. There's two in the house here - a ProBook 6470b and an Envy dv7. The ProBook is at best "ok", it's nothing special and to be honest my old Dell D620 is a better machine. The dv7 on the other hand is a pretty handsome piece of kit - sounds good and the screen's nice too.

Major downsides of the HP kit is that invariably it's stuffed to the gills with all kinds of bundled "goodies", and there's a whole lot of HP stuff that wants you to register with this service or that. Some of the bundled stuff might actually be useful to you, but the rest probably should be junked. For example, the last one I bought had some software on it that allowed you to use your Android phone as a remote control for media player - nice.

Strangely enough, disks used in the laptops seem to be pretty slow - 5400rpm even on most of the "top end" models. I'm seriously unimpressed with the boot up time on that dv7, so it's going to get a disk upgrade - SSD if I can afford it, Seagate SSHD if I can't.

Build quality is also variable - this depending very much on who was in charge at the time. During the period of the Mark Hurd CEO-ship quality was generally poor, but since he's left there's been more focus on "getting it right". And of course, there's always the CarePack extended warranties - took out a two-year on-site in December for that dv7 and it was pretty easy.

Hopefully the one you get won't be a "Friday afternoon special".

[DanceswithUnix]

I'm yet to see an HP laptop in the past half a decade or so where the battery lasts beyond a year before needing replacing. We've 5 year old refurbished Acer laptops where the batteries still last an hour.

It's a shame, as otherwise every aspect of the HP laptops I've seen has been fantastic.

My three year old amd e350 based HP laptop/netbook (11.6") still seems OK.

It only gets light use, but it does get used on battery when it is used so perhaps active use of the cells helps.

I wonder if the bezel is to allow an 11" or 12" screen in the same chassis. But to get my wallet twitching I would want a Kaveri based 19W CPU in there to replace the 18W Zacate I am using now.

[ZaO]

I'm yet to see an HP laptop in the past half a decade or so where the battery lasts beyond a year before needing replacing. We've 5 year old refurbished Acer laptops where the batteries still last an hour.

It's a shame, as otherwise every aspect of the HP laptops I've seen has been fantastic.

Shame about the battery. But the build quality is the main thing that concerns me. So hopefully I'm good there!

Engineering a slim bezel is expensive, since you have to use high-strength materials with the accompanying cost increase. This 10z is designed to be as cheap as possible, so it's "Fisher Price" bezels I'm afraid. All the reviews I've seen have been pretty scathing about the battery provision on the 10z - "inadequate" being one of the less abusive summations.

(Disclaimer: yes I work for HP, but the opinions expressed here are my own)
HP laptops? Mixed opinions on those. There's two in the house here - a ProBook 6470b and an Envy dv7. The ProBook is at best "ok", it's nothing special and to be honest my old Dell D620 is a better machine. The dv7 on the other hand is a pretty handsome piece of kit - sounds good and the screen's nice too.

Major downsides of the HP kit is that invariably it's stuffed to the gills with all kinds of bundled "goodies", and there's a whole lot of HP stuff that wants you to register with this service or that. Some of the bundled stuff might actually be useful to you, but the rest probably should be junked. For example, the last one I bought had some software on it that allowed you to use your Android phone as a remote control for media player - nice.

Strangely enough, disks used in the laptops seem to be pretty slow - 5400rpm even on most of the "top end" models. I'm seriously unimpressed with the boot up time on that dv7, so it's going to get a disk upgrade - SSD if I can afford it, Seagate SSHD if I can't.

Build quality is also variable - this depending very much on who was in charge at the time. During the period of the Mark Hurd CEO-ship quality was generally poor, but since he's left there's been more focus on "getting it right". And of course, there's always the CarePack extended warranties - took out a two-year on-site in December for that dv7 and it was pretty easy.

Hopefully the one you get won't be a "Friday afternoon special".

Well this laptop seems like a pretty recent model as far as I can tell. Maybe that is why I can't find any info or reviews on the specific model anywhere yet! The Amd apu in it only came out in June (according to the Amd website). So yeh, it's gotta be a pretty new build I guess.. But, it could just be an existing build with this new apu in it. There are reviews on other models with similar names..

And as for the slow hdd - Well I'm already planning to upgrade that to an SSHD and chuck in another 8GB ram module. Assuming I'm happy with what I initially get Parcel tracking is looking like it's going to arrive today actually I'll let you guys know what I think! Cheers.

[watercooled]

Have you had a chance to play with it yet? What do you think?

[ZaO]

Have you had a chance to play with it yet? What do you think?

Hey yeh I have had plenty! I'll summarize my thoughts into bullet points:

* I hate all the bloatware.

* Why are there so many HP programs trying to call home :/

* Laptop build quality is pretty normal for the price range. The screen casing is really flimsy though! I get scared I will break the screen everytime I pull the thing open!

* The touchpad is pretty nice. It's got good configuration and sensitivity options.

* The Amd 6410 APU doesn't do quite as well as I though it would. I was expecting to be able to play Source games (Left4Dead etc). But on lowest settings it generally scrapes by at about 30fps (not good enough for me). Ah well... It pretty much manages to run my music projects in my DAW. But it does briefly struggle at times. Hoping a better soundcard will help out here.

* The soundcard makes the speakers pop quite loudly when shutting down/sleep and booting up the laptop. So I have to turn my amp right down to avoid damage to the speakers.

* "Beats audio" is one of the worst experiences with audio I've ever had. It's not even possible to set a flat eq with it. It's always messing with the sound in some way. It compresses all the audio to try and make it sound louder. You can really clearly hear the limiter in action. It's nasty! I had to uninstall the drivers and use the default windows one!

* Windows 8 sucks.

* I miss my desktop with Windows 7

* But I am happy to support Amd over Intel with this purchase


I know I have more negative points haha.. But I think this laptop is pretty normal for the price range. But if there's anything specific you want to know about it - then I'll try and answer that for you

[watercooled]

Thanks for posting.

About the bloatware, on some Win7 netbooks, I've had some success re-installing from a plain Windows iso and activating with the COA sticker over the phone to get rid of the bloatware. The licensing model is different for 8 though, and the isos aren't freely available for 8 like they were for 7, but it might be worth investigating.

Is the Beatzzz rubbish just a software thing you could get rid of, or is part of the driver package somehow? It might still be possible to find a generic driver for the audio from the Realtek/VIA/whatever websites.

Yeah it's just a shame manufactures seem to fuel the negative brand image of AMD by not including them in as many higher-spec'd models.

On the subject of performance, this is a <4W TDP, 2.8W 'SDP' Mullins chip, and one of the lower-clocked ones, so it's more of a tablet processor; giving it full Windows + keyboard, I can imagine it starting to struggle with heavier stuff. How would you say performance compares, subjectively, to the likes of the first-gen Atom netbooks, if you ever used one? I would find myself waiting around for them a fair bit, although the measly amount of RAM they often shipped with didn't help either.

[ZaO]

Thanks for posting.

About the bloatware, on some Win7 netbooks, I've had some success re-installing from a plain Windows iso and activating with the COA sticker over the phone to get rid of the bloatware. The licensing model is different for 8 though, and the isos aren't freely available for 8 like they were for 7, but it might be worth investigating.

Is the Beatzzz rubbish just a software thing you could get rid of, or is part of the driver package somehow? It might still be possible to find a generic driver for the audio from the Realtek/VIA/whatever websites.

Yeah it's just a shame manufactures seem to fuel the negative brand image of AMD by not including them in as many higher-spec'd models.

On the subject of performance, this is a <4W TDP, 2.8W 'SDP' Mullins chip, and one of the lower-clocked ones, so it's more of a tablet processor; giving it full Windows + keyboard, I can imagine it starting to struggle with heavier stuff. How would you say performance compares, subjectively, to the likes of the first-gen Atom netbooks, if you ever used one? I would find myself waiting around for them a fair bit, although the measly amount of RAM they often shipped with didn't help either.

Yeh you could do that with Windows 7 But Windows 8 keys are embedded into the Bios with laptops So I'm not sure I could even get a clean and bloatware free, Oem install of W8 here.

I uninstalled the sound drivers and got some generic ones from the Realtek website. But that Beats thing appeared again! I'm sure I would be able to find out where it's running from and uninstall it. But for now, I've just stuck with the generic windows sound drivers.

And that's true. I actually found it pretty hard to find any Amd Cpu's/Apu's in laptops. And I was only looking in the up to £400 price range!

Sorry, but I couldn't tell you about that specific comparison tbh. I'm normally a desktop user. But this thing is ok for casual usage. Though I feel like £400 should net me something that is capable of significantly more than just general web browsing and stuff. I mean, it can do more than that. But I could probably get a more advanced phone for the money. But again, in comparison to others in this price range, it looks fairly normal as far as I can tell from specs and benchmarks. It doesn't feel anywhere near as snappy as my desktop did. But that comes as no surprise to me really..