Following is the review of the base variant of the brand new HP 14.
Specifications:
This machine from HP is powered by the Intel Core I3 processor. It's a 10th generation processor, it's got four gigs of ram on board, a one terabyte hard drive and a full HD glossy panel which has very good anti-reflective properties. This is an entry level laptop that comes with a 4G slot built in, so you can actually take a sim card, pop it in, and you have connectivity wherever you go.
Performance:
When we ran our suite of benchmark tests on the HP 14; whether it be 3D marks basic graphic level tests, pc marks office suite tests, 7-zip and benchmarking or even disk speed test so all of these tests reinforces the fact that this is an entry-level laptop.
If you have a browser window open with multiple tabs, you will eventually start seeing that your system starts putting these tabs to sleep; this is simply because of the 4gb of ram and the hard drive. In today's time, running the system with the hard drive is just a painful process. HP recognizes that and allows the user to also pop in an M2 SSD for instance;128 256 gigs which is fairly cheap these days. Pop it in and you have the advantage of speed. In terms of ram upgrade ability, unfortunately you get only a single dim slot. In order to cope with this, remove the 4 gig stick and put in an 8 gig stick, it will improve the day-to-day performance of the laptop.
Display:
It has the full HD display having reflective panel in it. The reflectivity level is not only good at suppressing reflections but it's also a fairly bright panel. To see our it works, we locked a brightness of 410 lux by using our lux meter and used it outdoors under the bright sun. We have experienced that everything was fairly easily and very clearly legible so that's a very big plus point.
Keyboard:
The keyboard is perhaps one of my favorite things about this laptop. It offers really good travel, the response is very good, the keys are fairly tactile and the typing experience in general was actually very amazing. This is again something that reinforces my belief that the HP 14 would be best served in the hands of a student who has to do a lot of typing, project work or to make a lot of presentations or maybe for somebody whose job requires a lot of typing. If you don't need a very powerful laptop then the keyboard here is actually a very solid recommendation.
Connectivity:
Connectivity is not going to be a problem because you have the ports on the right and on the left. It is in line with what is offered by most laptop manufacturers.
Battery Life:
It comes with a 40 Watt battery, on the pc mark 10 work battery benchmark, it gives about six hours worth of battery life. But on day to day usage, the mileage vary between five to five and a half hours, and not more than that. It could be attributed to the fact that it also has a 4G sim in there and the radio does drain the battery. Overall for an entry-level laptop, it still offers pretty decent battery life, five hours of continuous use is not bad. If you're more judicious let's say you're using good battery management practices, you put the laptop to sleep when you're not using it you could actually get about an entire day's worth of usage out of it
What Doesn't Work For The HP 14?
It's not built poorly, it's not that HP is using some sub-standard materials but unfortunately there is flex everywhere. There is flex on the lid, there is flex on the base and there is flex on the keyboard island. If you were to hold the laptop with just one hand and you make a good grip on it, you'll find that the laptop blade is sort of bending inwards. It's not a very comforting feeling but that's what happens so build quality leads us to believe that if you were to use this laptop on a daily basis, you'd have to be careful.
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