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The HP Pavilion line was always been classy, and the dv6 is a beautifully designed and built laptop. The lid has a smart engraved pattern, and opens up to reveal a red metallic keyboard panel and glossy black screen bezel. A metallic strip around the edge houses a wide selection of expansion ports, and the entire laptop feels well built.
An AMD Phenom II processor explains the lower than expected price. These budget chips aren’t exactly under-powered, but overall score of 65 lags behind similarly priced laptops with Intel Core i3 chips. The dv6 is far more powerful than a netbook, but about half as fast as a budget desktop PC these days. A dedicated AMD graphics card means you can watch HD videos, it’s almost powerful enough to play 3D games at low quality settings.
A 500GB hard disk provides ample room for your files, and the dv6 has a surprisingly good variety of expansion ports. There are four USB ports, one of which is shared with an eSATA port for fast external hard drives, and a memory card reader for quick photo transfers from your digital camera. HP hasn’t scrimped on the networking either: the LAN port supports Gigabit Ethernet – handy for large backups – and there’s 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth.
There’s an HDMI output as well as an analogue VGA video output, so you could connect the dv6 to a larger screen or even an AV amplifier for the full home cinema experience. Sounds from the internal speakers are bland, with very weak bass and tinny high notes. They’re loud enough for watching YouTube videos, but movies will be lacking.
The screen is reasonably bright and colourful, although not as bright as we’d expected from a screen with LED backlighting. Vertical viewing angles are tricky, and exacerbated by the reflective finish, but as long as there aren’t any bright lights overhead the picture is sharp and has good contrast. The LED backlight also contributed towards a battery life of almost five hours in our light-use test.
Looking good is one thing, but usability is quite another. Unfortunately both the keyboard and touchpad suffer from serious problems. The touchpad is a single slab with marked areas where the buttons should be. Annoyingly, these areas are still touch sensitive, so you constantly find yourself either moving the cursor with your button finger, or triggering a multi-touch gesture.
HP has also made some frustrating decisions with the keyboard. First, short cuts are the default actions for the function. Second, a column of short cut keys to the left of the keyboard means that when you reach for the Ctrl key you often launch Calculator instead. In addition, the keys are a bit bouncy and lack bite so they don’t provide enough feedback.
While the dv6-3065ea has a generous list of features and a gorgeous design, it’s let down badly by the over-designed touchpad and the irritating keyboard. An alternative, is the MSI CX623-203UK, with its more powerful processor, similar battery life and a better display.
