First look: HP Envy x360 13 boasts a superfast-charging battery

With its latest Envy x360 13 laptop, HP takes a travel-friendly cue from smartphones and electric cars by introducing a fast-charge battery which goes from zero to 50% capacity in 45 minutes.

After all, enjoying all-day battery life is one thing: and as the new Envy x360 13 chalks up 11 hours on a single tank that's a real working day for the business traveller, not some cushy 9-to-5 desk gig.

"But what use is all that battery life if the process of recharging carves hours out of your schedule?" reasoned the boffins at the world's leading laptop brand, which counts almost a quarter of all PC sales in its column.

Hence the Envy's fast-charge fix: even when Windows decides that less than 5% of juice means it's time to pull down the shutters, connecting the Envy x360 to the nearest AC socket for just one hour will see the laptop primed for another solid six hours of action.

Something else which sets the Envy x360 13 apart from the pack is its use of an AMD processor rather than the more popular Intel silicon. AMD is of course no newcomer to this game: its battle against Intel stretched back to the 1980s and was feverishly contested at the performance end of the market.

This time round, AMD's focus is on combining processing muscle with parsimonious battery drain. The 2GHz quad-core Ryzen powerplant is matched with a Radeon Vega graphics chip so there's ample headroom to go beyond the day-to-day of Office, even if that just means a fat Excel spreadsheet or a packed PowerPoint deck.

The model's x360 moniker denotes a tilty twisty design with the 13 inch screen standing in conventional laptop mode or swivelling around to face your client or become a tent-like video player, a mode bolstered by the four-speaker Bang & Olufsen audio system.

From any angle the clean sharply-sculptured lines of all-metal chassis lend a premium finish to a laptop which doesn't go ego-tripping to be the world's thinnest or lightest, but instead settles for being a slim stalwart that'll effortlessly slip into your carry-on bag and onto the conference room table.

Pricing for the 2018 HP ENVY x360 13 starts at $1,599 with an AMD Ryzen 3 processor, Radeon Vega 3 GPU, 8GB of RAM and 256GB solid state drive; an upmarket model fitted out with a faster Ryzen 5 chip and Vega 8 GPU lands at $1,799.

David Flynn

David Flynn is the Editor-in-Chief of Executive Traveller and a bit of a travel tragic with a weakness for good coffee, shopping and lychee martinis.