Hp Elitebook Folio G1 Laptop Core M7 6th Gen 8 Gb 256 Gb Ssd, Windows 10, 12.5" Display

In the race to make the thinnest laptop on the block, manufacturers often sacrifice usability, slapping on uncomfortable keyboards, eschewing key ports or providing mediocre performance. Though it's even slimmer than the MacBook (12-inch), HP's EliteBook Folio G1 is a productivity powerhouse, complete with a sharp 12.5-inch screen, a sleek but durable design that survives serious drops and one of the best keyboards I've used on a laptop. With strong speakers, fanless cooling and an infrared camera for face logins, the EliteBook Folio G1 gets almost everything right, but its battery life could be better.

Design

With its wisp-thin, matte-silver aluminum chassis, the EliteBook Folio G1 is a very attractive laptop that happens to look a lot like the 12-inch MacBook. However, a shiny silver hinge and HP logo help distinguish it from Apple's lightweight laptop. The Folio retains the same aesthetic on the inside, but with a shiny black bezel that's thin on the sides, but leaves room up top for a webcam.

At 11.5 x 8.23 x 0.47 inches, the EliteBook Folio G1 is even thinner than the MacBook, but it's also taller and wider (11.04 x 7.74 x 0.14-0.52 inches). The Dell Latitude13 7370(12 x 8.3 x 0.56 inches), the 14-inch-screened Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (13.11 x 9.02 x 0.65 inches) and the Razer Blade Stealth (12.6 x 8.1 x 0.52 inches) are also thicker.

At 2.14 pounds, HP's laptop is just a little heavier than the 2.04-pound MacBook, but much lighter than the Latitude 13, Carbon and Stealth. With a touch screen, the Folio gets 0.02 inches thicker and .22 pounds heavier.

Durability

HP built the EliteBook Folio G1 to take quite a licking. The company said its notebook survived being dropped 26 times, at different angles, from 30 inches onto a hard surface.

The Folio also passed MIL-STD 810G durability tests for dust, vibration, shocks and high altitudes. However, unlike on many other business laptops, the keyboard is not spill-resistant.

Security and Facial Login

The HP EliteBook Folio has a number of security features that will please corporate IT managers and users alike. Like the majority of business laptops, the HP's laptop comes standard with TPM encryption and, with its optional Core m7 CPU, offers Intel vPro remote management.

Unlike its competitors, the Folio has an infrared webcam that you can use with Windows 10's Hello biometric login; it even works in the dark. After setting up Hello, the camera did a great job of recognizing my face quickly and accurately, even when I was sitting in bed at night with all the lights off. However, if you wear glasses, it's important to let Hello capture your image both with and without them on.

The EliteBook Folio comes preloaded with HP Client Security, a very robust suite of tools that includes a password manager, drive encryption software and HP Spare Key, which allows you to log in even if you forget your password (and don't have Hello). You can also designate Bluetooth devices such as your phone as a token that unlocks your computer.

The Folio also has HP's Sure Start with Dynamic Protection, which guards the BIOS -- the software that allows your computer to boot in the first place -- by keeping a separate "clean" copy of it available. If a virus or hacker installs a corrupt BIOS, Sure Start immediately replaces it with the previous version.

Display

We tested configurations of the EliteBook Folio G1 with 1080p nontouch and 4K touch displays. Both panels offered detailed images, but colors were much more vibrant on the 4K panel. When I watched a 1080p trailer for Captain America: Civil War, the orange in an explosion and the red behind the Marvel logo really popped. Even the slider bar in Windows 10's media player stood out, with an electric blue that reminded me of Tron.

Audio

The EliteBook Folio G1's bottom-mounted Bang & Olufsen speakers provided accurate audio that was more than loud enough to fill the first floor of my house. When I listened to hard rock songs like the Styx's "Renegade" and Deep Purple's "Smoke On The Water," the music and vocals were rich, but guitars and other high pitches distorted at maximum volume.

The included Bang & Olufsen software provides an audio-enhancement mode, which was enabled by default and made the output sound hollow when I turned it off. The app also allows you to adjust the equalizer with presets for different genres of music such as rock and jazz.

Keyboard and Touchpad

Despite its thin chassis, the EliteBook Folio G1 packs in one of the most comfortable and responsive ultraportable laptop keyboards I've ever tested. According to our measurements, the keys have only 1.05 mm of travel, which is twice as deep as the 12-inch MacBook's keys (0.5 mm) but far less than a typical laptop, which has 1.5 to 2 mm of vertical space beneath the keys. However, the keys offer such snappy feedback that I never "bottomed out," or hit the base with a lot of force. The keyboard even sounded good, providing a pleasant clack of audible feedback as I typed.

No wonder I achieved a rate of 104 words per minute with less than 1 percent error rate -- one of my best scores ever -- on the 10fastfingers.com typing test. The keyboard comes with a backilght that was more than bright enough at both its low and high settings. However, unlike on many other business laptops, the EliteBook Folio G1's keyboard is not spill-resistant.

While many buttonless pads suffer from jumpiness, the Folio G1's 3.6 x 2.3-inch pad was as accurate as a high-res optical mouse. During my testing, I highlighted text in documents, clicked 8GB of icons and navigated around Windows 10 with great precision. Multitouch gestures such as two-finger scroll, three-finger swipe and pinch-to-zoom worked flawlessly.