The initial bum rush of ultrabooks resulted in, with limited exception, a lot of designs that took most of their cues from Apple's MacBook Air. Even Dell's XPS 13, otherwise very different from what came before it, still maintained that wedge shape. Yet HP went a bit of a different route with their Folio 13 and demonstrated the same kind of outside the box thinking that many of the larger vendors are demonstrating these days.

HP's engineers took a look at Intel's ultrabook spec and, rather than see how small they could get their design, opted to see just how much they could pack into the spec. The result is the Folio 13, an ultrabook designed to bridge their consumer and business lines and offer the best an ultrabook can offer.

The ultrabook spec is pretty well defined without much in the way of wiggle room for the hardware itself, leaving vendors to differentiate largely on overall chassis design and price. The initial rush of ultrabooks included systems from Toshiba, Asus, and Acer that largely aped Apple's MacBook Air wedge shape and aluminum shell design, but HP and Dell played things close to the chest initially. HP's Folio 13 actually predates Dell's XPS 13, but both are intriguing designs that deviate from the norm in their own ways. Let's start with the specifications of our Folio 13 review unit.

While most of HP's notebooks allow some level of customization, the Folio 13 really only has one internal hardware configuration, and you're looking at it. While some of the exterior elements are certainly a fresh approach for ultrabooks, HP has strangely opted to be much more conservative with speccing their ultrabook than other vendors have, and there are a few places where the Folio 13 is going to definitely lag behind the competition.

The Intel Core i5-2467M processor isn't slow by any stretch of the imagination, but it's the only ULV Core i5 we've tested this generation, with other vendors either just going for the cheapest chip (Toshiba's i3) or an expensive but faster i7. At a 1.6GHz nominal clock speed and able to turbo up to 2.1GHz on both cores or 2.3GHz on a single core, it's not a total slouch but it's also not the fastest chip around either.

HP also inexplicably uses only one memory channel on the i5's controller, and while the DDR3 is clocked higher at 1600MHz that can't make up for halving the memory bus width. Ultimately this shouldn't be a huge detriment to performance, but it's still performance left on the table. That single channel is populated by 4GB of RAM, too, which is enough for most tasks but is still shy of what can be achieved with most modern notebooks and even some modern ultrabooks.

Handling SSD storage duties is a Samsung PM810 running at SATA 3Gbps. Anecdotally, in real world usage I've found most of the benefit of running an SSD is felt just by virtue of the difference in responsiveness between an SSD and a mechanical hard disk drive. Connectivity is thankfully pretty good for this class of notebook, though: HP includes a USB 3.0 port and HDMI on top of the usual ports we've come to expect, along with a gigabit ethernet port for wired networking.

Ultimately, though, the specs on the Folio 13 are rather tame for an ultrabook, which is all the more perplexing since other vendors were able to cram more power into smaller designs. When I met with HP a few months ago when they were debuting the Folio 13, they showed me the interior and said they pretty much just doubled down on the battery, which is why the Folio 13 is also slightly bigger and heavier than other ultrabooks. Whether or not that gamble paid off remains to be seen.

In and Around the HP Folio 13

After reviewing nothing but wedge-shaped ultrabooks, the HP Folio 13 is actually a bit of a breath of fresh air. HP's design here doesn't actually deviate all that much from the rest of their notebook lineup; aesthetically it sits right between their consumer and enterprise lines (much as it's intended to), and as I mentioned before they eschewed the wedge shape and kept the build right at the 18mm cusp of Intel's ultrabook spec.

The top lid and interior surface of the Folio 13 are aluminum, while the screen bezel and bottom of the notebook appear to be either carbon fiber or a rubberized treatment on matte plastic; either way, it's soft, light, durable, and attractive. In fact the only gloss on the Folio 13 is surrounding the keyboard and on the screen's interior bezel (which houses the webcam.)

Where HP can claim a major victory with the Folio 13 is the keyboard proper. Ultrabook keyboards, by virtue of the form factor, tend to be very shallow and can be difficult to use. Since HP's engineers seem to have gone in reverse and tried to see how big they could get the Folio while keeping it thin, light, and within spec, the result is a keyboard that has much better depth and travel. It's still not perfect and feels a little on the mushy side, but compared to the others I've tested it's much more comfortable. And as a special bonus: it's backlit.

Unfortunately, despite having an excellent keyboard for an ultrabook, the Folio 13's touchpad is another poorly implemented clickpad. As we've mentioned before and as Anand has even said to me personally, PC vendors still can't seem to get this part of the design down. Honestly I'm at a loss as to why they keep trying, as I have yet to use one that provides a tangible benefit over just using a traditional touchpad and pair of mouse buttons. At this point the only vendor with dedicated mouse buttons on their ultrabook is Toshiba. During testing I found the clickpad had such a hard time detecting misclicks that I was largely forced to use an external mouse.

Finally, the screen on the Folio 13 is another poor-quality 768p TN panel. It's not really worth going through the full rigamarole for something that bothers all of us; suffice to say it's "competitive" with the majority of what's out there in this class, though hopefully the days of dismal notebook screens are drawing to a close as tablet screens push things forward.

The remainder of the results are available in Bench, but you can tell the Folio 13's screen isn't very good even by ultrabook standards. The best in an otherwise bad bunch are the ASUS Zenbook UX31E, which at least sports at 1600x900 resolution, and the vastly more expensive Sony Vaio Z2, which runs at full 1080p but costs nearly twice what some of the other ultraportables do.

System Performance

By opting to employ an Intel Core i5 instead of Core i7 (ULV, of course), and then only operating the DDR3 in single-channel mode, HP puts the Folio 13 at a bit of a disadvantage compared to the competition. The Toshiba Portege Z830 is the only one that really has things worse off, but it's also the least expensive of the lot. Here's how the performance charts pan out:

Ultimately the Folio 13 bounces around the middle of our PCMark charts, buoyed somewhat by the decent Samsung SSD included. You can certainly make the case that all of the above systems are "fast enough" for most users, and the SSDs in the ultrabooks definitely help in that regard. As long as you're not doing any heavy number crunching or trying to play games, ULV Sandy Bridge is likely more than sufficient.

Unfortunately, once we get to the CPU-isolated tests, the Folio 13's i5 gets absolutely buried, only really able to best the Toshiba Portege Z830's i3. The difference between the two is wide enough to make the i3's lack of turbo boost felt, but the i7 systems almost all put in stronger showings across the board with the exception of the Dell XPS 13, which may be struggling with thermal limitations. If we ignore the full-voltage CPUs, the difference between the i5-2467M and the fastest i7-2677M ranges from as little as 11% in the second pass of our x264 test to as much as 28% in our single-threaded Cinebench result. That's certainly noticeable, but it may not be worth the added cost--HP obviously felt the i5-2467M was a good balancing point, since they didn't bother to support any of the other ULV chips.

3DMark once again reminds us that these aren't gaming machines; the thin-and-lights equipped with dedicated graphics fare worlds better. Llano likewise easily surpasses the ULV HD 3000, and in fact outside of single-threaded performance the quad-core Llano chips generally offer comparable to superior performance; of course, getting Llano into an ultrabook form factor with an SSD would require some changes to the design and pricing strategry for such laptops.

Battery Life

HP's engineers seem to have short-changed some of the hardware itself in the Folio 13, but those sacrifices (along with sacrifices in form factor) were made in an effort to cram as large a battery as possible into the Folio 13. Indeed, it does include the biggest internal battery of any of the ultrabooks we've tested; the Acer TravelMate's battery is bigger on paper but it sticks out of the chassis slightly, while the Alienware M11x R3 can't really be classified as an ultrabook.

Interestingly, despite having a bigger battery than much of the competition, HP's Folio 13 is only able to provide middling efficiency. Battery life isn't poor by any stretch of the imagination, but ultimately the gamble doesn't seem to have paid off as much as HP would've liked as it's clear there's still some optimization that needs to be done.

Heat and Noise

Another area where the HP Folio 13 benefits tremendously as the result of HP's engineers willing to go a little bit thicker than the competition is in its cooling system. Noise even under load is a fairly quiet whine, and the system does a good job of keeping the i5 running frosty.

Having gotten used to seeing systems running in the 80s and higher, it's refreshing to see the Folio 13 only peaking in the mid-70s where full-sized notebooks tend to hang out. That said, I'm still not thrilled with the idea of having the fan intake on the bottom of the ultrabook (or on any laptop, really). As systems designed to be as light and portable as possible it stands to reason these are going to be used on laps most of the time, and while HP smartly positions the intake near the back and center of the bottom of the notebook, it still seems like this could cause problems. I feel like there has to be a better way to turn ultrabooks into true laptops.

Conclusion: A Mixed Bag

Of the ultrabooks I've tested so far, the ones I've personally liked the best have been the Dell XPS 13 and this one, the HP Folio 13. Both have fairly good keyboards and both deviate from the norm a little bit, displaying some ingenuity and thought in their designs. I particularly appreciate the Folio 13's more boxy design; it seems silly, but the lack of a wedge shape is refreshing and more than that, helps to both distinguish HP's entrant visually and gives their engineers some elbow room.

What we're still looking at, fundamentally, is the first generation of ultrabooks. The first generation of netbooks wasn't so hot, either, and most of us remember the first generation iPad being derided as a giant iPhone. All of the vendors seem to be working out kinks, and it doesn't help that Sandy Bridge isn't quite as ready for this form factor as Ivy Bridge will be (and Haswell especially, further down the line). Intel's spec is forward-looking in a way that's good for the future, but leads to compromises in the here and now. Hence, working kinks out so that the second generation should be a lot more impressive.

To that end, I think the form factor, design, and the aesthetic of the HP Folio 13 are fundamentally the strong points. It has one of the best keyboards available in an ultrabook, and it runs nice and frosty. What HP needs to work on for the next revision is eschewing the clickpad and going back to a traditional touchpad with dedicated buttons, increasing the customization available (including running the system's memory in dual-channel instead of single-channel mode), bumping the mSATA speed up to 6Gbps for future-proofing's sake, and further optimizing power consumption. That the screen needs to be replaced with something better goes without saying, but I'm optimistic that the days of lousy, low-resolution TN displays in notebooks are numbered.

None of the ultrabooks available right now is perfect. With Ivy Bridge en route, hopefully we'll be seeing refreshes soon that work out many of the weaknesses of this generation while building on their strengths. In the meantime, if you need a system right now it's going to come down to which one feels the best for you. Performance is generally comparable (excepting the Toshiba Portege Z830 and its turbo-free Core i3) between the systems as such that you don't really give up anything tangible going with a slower processor, and battery life is essentially the same way. As such, it's a matter of preference.

Personally, I like the HP Folio 13 more than most, and pricing is decent at around $1000 for our review unit. However, like the competition the Folio 13 just doesn't seem quite ready for prime time yet. It's also important to remember that Ivy Bridge refreshes within the next month could substantially alter the ultrabook landscape.