Hp laptop - 15t-dy200 reviews

At a Glance

Experts Rating

Our Verdict

The HP 15t Touch is proof if you put as much care and design love into a $500 laptop as you would a $1,000 laptop, good things happen.

If I didnt know better, Id say HP had something to prove. Early on in this reviews round-up HP sent over its Pavilion x360 11T Touch Selecta beautiful machine, and already one of our top recommendations in the sub-$500 range. And then at the eleventh hour it sent over the HP 15t Touch, which not only looks better but performs better too.

HPs not messing around.

The design

The Pavilion x360 HP sent over was clearly meant to stand out, with its bold candy apple red case. And the HP 15t Touch is clearly meant to stand out toojust not quite as overtly.

Here its all about the subtle touchesa matte black finish with a faint diamond design thats almost soft to the touch. Its also, I should mention, an absolute fingerprint magnet. The 15t Touch looks fantastic fresh out of the package, but its going to take some effort to keep it looking that way.

The diamond motif continues once youve opened the lid, where youll immediately notice two-thirds of the hard plastic tray is embossed with the tiniest of diamonds. It looks almost like the trays been drilled with speaker or ventilation holes, except its purely decorative design work. Classy looking, too.

And then theres the trackpad, which is flush with the tray instead of embeddedand made from seemingly the same matte material as the rest of the interior. The only sign its the trackpad is the lack of the familiar diamond pattern, plus the two physical mouse buttons located underneath. Its elegantthe type of trackpad youd expect to find on a much more expensive machine.

HPs Pavilion 15t Touch is one of the stand out laptops here but an absolute finger print magnet.

Its not just a pretty face, either. This is one of the most responsive trackpads weve dealt with in the sub-$500 range, though Id recommend turning up the sensitivity a bit. The hardest part is actually finding the trackpad. The trackpad is ever-so-slightly depressed into the tray, but not a lot. And since its the same material as the rest of the laptop, it can be a bit difficult to figure out where your hand needs to go in the dark. I guess thats the price you pay for something that looks this badass.

The keyboard is also top-of-the-line for this tier. The keys are fun on the 15t Touch, with both an excellent click and a decent amount of travel. And as far as design, I was impressed by both the slightly rough texture of the keys and the understated typeface HP used. The 15t Touch is simply designed to look good.

A paltry screen is the only aspect of the 15t Touchs design I find truly lacking. Not only is it the standard $500-laptop resolution of 1366×768, but its a lackluster 15.6-inch TN panel with very poor color (despite the WLED tech HP touts). And while the viewing angles are admittedly better than the screens on the Toshiba C55-C or the Acer E-15, its a far cry from the IPS display on the Pavilion x360. The panel also doubles as a touchscreen, though it was poor at tracking fast gestures and I eventually gave up on using itsomething Im fine with, as I hate fingerprints on my laptop screen regardless.

Port-wise, the 15t Touch is rocking power, ethernet, one USB 3.0, one USB 2.0, HDMI, and the audio jack on the left side, while the right features an additional USB 2.0 slot, an SD card reader, and an optical drive. The left side is also equipped with a sizeable ventilation grate, which unfortunately spins up noticeably loud at times.

You could always drown it out with the 15t Touchs speakers though. While lacking the B&O branding of its Pavilion x360 cousin, the 15t Touchs audio is respectably loud and clear. It does have the same flaw as the x360 though in that the main speakers are located on the bottom front of the laptop, meaning the audio is perfectly fine on hard surfaces but gets muffled and grainy when placed on any soft surface (i.e. a lap).

The specs

Like the Pavilion x360, the HP 15t Touch is pretty much neck-and-neck with the Dell Inspiron 15 5000 Series as far as performance goes. Unlike the Pavilion x360 though, the 15t Touchs benchmarks really do tell the whole story.

The Pavilion x360 is a perfectly serviceable machine, but a lot of its benchmark performance comes from a zippy 128GB SSD driveallowing it to seemingly outperform the Inspiron 15 5000 even though its only packing a Core M-5Y10c processor.

The 15t Touch, on the other hand, outperforms the Inspiron 15 5000 in certain tests because it basically is the Inspiron 15 5000. Except slightly better. Under the hood, the 15t Touch packs an Intel Core i3-5010U processor at 2.10GHz (compared to the Inspiron 15 5000s i3-5005U at 2GHz).

Aside from that, the 15t Touch and the Inspiron 15 5000 are identicalintegrated Intel HD 5500 graphics, 6GB of RAM, and a 5,400 RPM hard drive (though the 15t Touchs is only 750GB as opposed to the Inspiron 15 5000s 1TB drive).

And no surprise, both machines turned out very similar benchmark scores. In PCMark 8s Home Conventional test the 15t Touch scored 2,159, which compares favorably to the Dells score of 2,210 (though the Toshiba C55-C outperforms both with a score of 2,527).

The 15t Touch also outperforms the Inspiron 15 5000 in the Creative Conventional and Work Conventional tests, with scores of 2,000 and 2,485 to the Inspirons 1,933 and 2,436 respectively. Again, both are outperformed by Toshibas machine, with scores of 2,198 and 2,771. These are marginal differences though, and Toshibas machine is nowhere near as sexy as either the 15t Touch or the Inspiron 15 5000.

And importantly, the 15t Touch performs favorably in our Handbrake test too. Here we feed the machine a 30GB MKV file in Handbrake and ask it to transcode it to a 1GB-ish file. The 15t Touch completed this task in 2 hours and 48 minutes, edging out the Dells 2 hour and 55 minute markand handily beating the Pavilion x360s 3 hours and 43 minutes.

All this to say the 15t Touch isnt just a good-looking machine. Theres a decent amount of power backing up HPs fantastic design work.

The bloat

Unfortunately, the 15t Touch is just as packed with useless/semi-useless software as HPs Pavilion x360.

McAfees set up squatting rights on the 15t Touch, as per usual. Like always, I recommend finding yourself a better antivirus program (if youre going to run one).

Theres also the usual suite of HP first-party programs, with HP Connected Drive and Connected Music leading the charge.

But even worse is the absolutely phenomenal amount of third-party apps HP stuffs their machines with. Our review laptop came loaded down with Netflix, Dropbox, CyberLink Media Suite et al, WildTangent Games, SnapFish, Simple Solitaire, Microsoft Mahjong, Amazon, The Weather Channel, mysms, Evernote, andmost baffling of allPriceline and TripAdvisor.

Like the Pavilion x360, none of the stuff HPs loading onto these laptops seems harmful, per se. Its all from names you know, like Netflix. But its still ugly clutter on a brand new machine.

The verdict

Its a tough call, but Id say the HP 15t Touch is overall the best sub-$500 laptop. Other laptops come closethe Dell Inspiron 15 5000 and HPs own Pavilion x360 11T are both great all-around machines, and the Toshiba Satellite C55-C obviously takes the performance crown.

But damn, the 15t Touch is a gorgeous machine. I was impressed with the look of the 15t Touch as soon as I pulled it out of the box, and aside from its penchant for fingerprints Im still impressed with it days later. And considering it has a great trackpad, fantastic keyboard, and the specs to back up its sleek look? And you can find the model we reviewed for only $430? Im definitely comfortable saying the 15t Touch is the best laptop we took a look at in this tier.

If HP came into this with something to prove, it proved it.