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Ultra-cheap laptops are nothing new, but few are as beautifully designed as the HP Pavilion Touchsmart 11-e030sa and have ten point touchscreens for just over £300. Its brushed metallic finish and smart looks are immediately appealing and make it look a lot more expensive than it is. To top it all it weighs just 1.4kg, so you can easily carry it everywhere.
Its well-made, too, as we saw hardly any flex in the screen or keyboard tray, and its wide range of ports give it plenty of versatility. We were particularly pleased to see two USB3 ports alongside its single USB2 port, and you’ll also find HDMI and VGA video outputs for connecting the laptop to an external display, an SD card reader, a Fast Ethernet port, and a combined headphone and microphone jack.
The touchscreen was wonderfully responsive and we were able to perform Windows 8 gestures without any trouble at all. Multi-touch gestures such as two-finger scrolling and pinch-zooming were smooth, too, and its 1,366×768 resolution looked sharp on its 11.6in display. Its viewing angles were good
The screen’s image quality was more mediocre, as our colour calibrator showed it was displaying just 53.2 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut. This is to be expected on a budget laptop, though, and colours still looked acceptable in our subjective solid colour image tests. Reds, greens and blues all retained a surprising amount of depth thanks to the screen’s glossy finish and none of them looked particularly drained or washed out.
Blacks were less impressive, though, as the screen’s high black level reading of 0.52cd/m2 meant they could appear quite grey depending on how we angled the screen. This also revealed the screen’s rather narrow viewing angles, which made it difficult to see our high contrast test photos clearly unless the screen was at just the right angle.
This isn’t helped by the display’s low contrast ratio, which we measured at just 298:1. This is one of the lowest contrast ratios we’ve seen so far, but we were pleasantly surprised by the amount of detail we were able to see when the screen was positioned correctly. Shadows were particularly well illuminated, but we tilted the screen out of its small sweet spot, it wasn’t long before everything was obscured.
This is a shame, but it’s a small complaint when the 11-e030sa is so comfortable to use on an everyday basis. The bouncy keys are well-spaced on its small chassis, and there’s plenty of space for your hands to rest on the keyboard tray.
We liked the touchpad’s individual buttons as well, which gave a excellent feedback when we clicked them and used them for dragging files and folders across the screen. We wouldn’t recommend trying to use the touchpad for multi-touch gestures, as two-finger scrolling rarely worked and pinch-zooming was practically impossible to control with any degree of accuracy. Swiping from the side for Windows 8 shortcuts also took several goes to get right, so you’ll want to use the touchscreen as much as possible to get the best out of Windows 8.
If we stopped there, the 11-e030sa would be an excellent choice. Sadly, its sluggish 1GHz AMD A4-1200 APU really lets it down when it comes to raw processing power, and even its 4GB of RAM doesn’t stop it from being one of the slowest laptops we’ve ever tested. It scored just 8 in our multimedia benchmarks, which makes it unsuited to anything but the most basic of everyday tasks. Attempting to use more than one program at once is out of the question, but we were still able to browse the web and compose word documents without too much hassle.
Needless to say, the only games you’ll be playing on the 11-e030sa will be simple Flash games from the Windows 8 Store, as its AMD Radeon HD 8120 integrated graphics chip isn’t cut out for 3D graphics. It failed our normal Dirt Showdown test, and we couldn’t even scrape 15fps when we set the quality settings to Low at 1,280×720 and disabled the anti-aliasing, so you’ll struggle to play any kind of 3D title.
This is a shame, as its battery life was fairly decent for a budget laptop. It lasted 5 hours and 44 minutes in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness. It’s not the best score we’ve seen from a cheap ultraportable, but it’s much more in line with what we’ve normally expect to see from a budget laptop.
The HP Pavilion Touchsmart 11-e030sa is an appealing laptop that’s great for taking on the go, but when the superior Asus X200CA costs £30 less, even its good looks and longer battery life aren’t quite enough to win us over.
