Review: HP Envy Leap Motion

Introduction

Though we've been waiting for Minority Report-style interfaces to arrive for years, so far we've been stuck with touchscreens, their infinitely more practical but much less futuristic cousin.

However, with the Leap Motion controller now out and gaining support in applications, we're a step closer. And the HP Envy Leap Motion here is the first laptop with this gesture-based technology built in – you won't find it even in more expensive machines such as the MSI GS70 Stealth or the MacBook Pro with Retina display.

It also comes with a regular multi-touch trackpad and a touchscreen, so there is a degree of overkill for control methods, it's true, but the ergonomics of laptops make it kind of a natural fit here. Your hands normally use laptops in the right kind of spots for the Leap Motion – you just need to lift them up off the surface a bit.

The Leap Motion sensor, a black bar on the right of the front, can detect your hand motion across the width of the laptop. You hold your hands over it, about half way up the height of the screen, and you can control compatible apps and games with a wave. The laptop comes with a dedicated app store for Leap Motion software, with some games and drawing tools available immediately.

Interestingly, the HP Envy Leap Motion isn't coasting on its namesake technology, though: being part of the Envy line, the company hasn't skimped on specs.

There's a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, powerful Nvidia 750M graphics with a near-overkill 4GB of dedicated video memory, and a whopping 12GB of RAM for the system.

It also comes with a 1TB hard drive (no SSD, though) for storage, with Windows 8.1 and the Leap Motion Airspace software for running Leap-enabled apps.

The huge 17.3-inch screen means that this is something of a beast, with a huge footprint and weighing 3.2kg – not the worst we've seen, but the sheer size and heft of the screen means that weight leans heavily towards the hinge, meaning you'll have to be careful when carrying it.

At least the space is being put to good use, with a 1920 x 1080 Full HD screen, and a numberpad alongside the keyboard.

It's all black and silver in appearance, with a black screen, black keys and a solid dark line for the Leap Motion sensor (which also includes a fingerprint scanner, just to pile on the features).

It looks much like all of HP's other high-end stuff recently, such as the Envy TouchSmart 15, and is a fairly handsome machine.

The back of the top panel is devoted to a speaker grille for the Beats Audio speakers, while at the side you'll find 4 USB 3.0 ports and, almost unusually these days, an optical drive. Blu-ray playback is a go on the big, detailed screen, so this is shaping up to be a media powerhouse.

It all makes the price a bit of a pleasant surprise, then – at £1199, it's certainly not cheap, but we expected it to be even more. We should mention the now-£800 Envy TouchSmart 15 again here, though – for around £400 more, will this really be able to justify the price increase?

Specifications

While there's a small whiff of the kitchen sink about the spec list on the HP Envy Leap Motion, it makes for fairly impressive reading.

Obviously, you've got the Leap Motion controller itself. This black strip on the right-hand side of the unit houses the infrared LEDs and IR cameras that build up 3D images of your hand as it waves over the keyboard.

The technology shares some similarities with what Microsoft does with the Kinect camera in the Xbox One, though it's largely more simple, and obviously operates at a much smaller scale.

The rest of the computer is less unusual, though, if still packed. For a start, you've got a quad-core Intel Core i7-4207MQ processor. Unpacking that string of near-meaningless digits reveals that this is a fairly high-end chip, though by no means Intel's most advanced.

There are four cores, running at 2.2GHz, with cores able to reach 3.2GHz using Intel's Turbo Boost feature. It features HyperThreading as well, meaning that it can run as eight virtual cores, improving performance in intensive multi-threaded operations.

The chip is from Intel's newest fourth-generation Core range, known as Haswell, which is designed to bring major battery life improvements over previous chips, though as you'll see on the next page, its effect here is minimal in this regard.

There are integrated Intel graphics with the processor, in the form of Intel's HD 4600 GPU – this is fairly low end, but can be used in light operation on the laptop to keep battery usage lower.

For when you really need graphical grunt, there's a dedicated Nvidia GeForce 750M GPU with 4GB of VRAM. The video RAM used here is GDDR3 instead of GDDR5, though, meaning that its bandwidth isn't as high. This, and other factors, means that while it's certainly a good performer, it isn't super high-end. The 770M in the Medion Erazer X7825 and Schenker XMG P703 will beat it for performance, and if you were to get the latter configured with the 780M, you'd be in the realm of a full-on gaming laptop.

However, though larger, heavier gaming machines might be able to pack in more power, we still expect the HP Envy Leap Motion do pretty well for itself with these components – especially combined with 12GB of RAM.

It's a very generous amount, and is more than most people will probably need – not that we're complaining about its inclusion.

The 1TB hard drive is purely old-fashioned spinning disk storage, with no SSD for booting, which can mean slower startup times. This has the potential to hold the machine back for high-performance word, but ultimately, there's a choice between size and speed. That said, for £1200, we'd hope for a bit of both.

The screen is a vast 17.2-inch 1080p affair, while Beats Audio speakers provide the sound from a grille that spans not far off the entire width of the machine.

For connectivity, you've got four USB 3.0 ports, which is better than most laptops offer at the moment, with HDMI, an Ethernet port, an SD card reader and a headphone jack rounding things out.

With more and more manufacturers choosing to go thin and light, optical drives are becoming less common, but HP has included a Blu-ray/DVD drive here, meaning that you can watch highest-quality HD films on that Full HD screen.

There's even a fingerprint scanner, since they're all the rage these days – especially since they've found their way onto the iPhone 5s, and HTC One MAX. Here, it's the classic little strip reader, though it's built into the black of the Leap Motion sensor, so is easy to miss.

Performance

Cinebench 11.5

OpenGL 52.68fps

CPU 6.34 pts

3D Mark

Ice Storm 57772

Cloud Gate 8800

Fire Strike 1541

Battery Eater Pro 70 minutes

When we said HP wasn't just relying on the Leap Motion controller to make this machine desirable, we weren't kidding. Just look at the benchmarks! Well, not the battery one, because it's terrible, but the others are great.

The quad-core Intel Core i7 processor produces a great score in our Cinebench tests, though we should point out that it's marginally lower than the 6.58 achieved by this machine's little brother, the HP Envy TouchSmart 15 – though that's not real surprise, since the CPU in this one is clocked marginally lower. The difference is negligible, but the TouchSmart 15 is a few hundred pounds cheaper these days, so it's not nothing.

However, the Envy Leap Motion laptop is comfortably ahead of the TouchSmart when it comes to graphics performance, veritably trashing its scores for the 3D Mark tests. In the Fire Strike test, it outscored it by 50%, thanks to its beefier Nvidia GeForce 750M graphics and 4GB of video RAM.

However, looking at this laptop's place in the larger scheme of things, it's not as clear cut. The Medion Erazer X7825 costs slightly less than this laptop, but offers a stronger CPU and GPU combination, and actually doubles the Envy Leap Motion's 3D Mark Fire Strike test score, despite having less video RAM – it's graphics are just hugely better elsewhere. The CPU also scores higher, but only by a small amount.

However, HP's secret weapon for some high-end applications here is the 12GB of RAM its packed in. That's generous beyond what any home user needs, really – sure it's always nice to have RAM, but for casual use, you generally won't find yourself struggling with 8GB.

So yes, it's pretty clear that HP has its sights set on this being a professional creative machine. However, it again takes a little bit of a back seat to HP's Envy TouchSmart 15, which offers 16GB (!) of RAM for less money.

This is only really an issue if you're doing some pretty high-end creative work, though. Even for regular Photoshop users or HD video editors, 12GB is fine. It's not really something that makes the TouchSmart 15 obviously better than this Envy Leap Motion for most people, but it's worth considering.

One area that this machine does get one up on its little brother, though, is the screen. It's larger, at 17-inches, but is still 1920 x 1080 Full HD. However, it offers great viewing angles and general image quality, beating even the (also 17-inch) Medion Erazer in this respect.

Colours look good, everything's nicely detailed and viewing angles are all superb, though we will say that it appears to have a slightly blue colour cast – for professional work, it's worth noting this. For most people, it's no problem at all, though – well within the norms that your eye just adjusts for when going from screen to screen.

Of course, the screen needs good viewing angles, because when you're using the Leap Motion controller, you end up moving around a fair bit.

Though the sensor strip is on the right of the machine, you can move your hand over the whole width of the laptop to control things on-screen. Well, we say "control things", but what we mean is "control compatible apps".

You can't just start instantly flicking through Windows 8 with a wave of your hand, which is a shame, because it would quite suit the tile-based UI, actually. But once you run the Leap Motion Airspace suite, you can play around in games and various other apps.

The thing is, though… it's not great. The simple visualisation stuff is awesome – seeing neon skeletons of your hands, and waving your way through abstract images is good fun for a while. But whenever you get into a game or useful app, you will start to need precision, and that just isn't happening.

It's a bit like the early raft of third-party Wii games. Nintendo made simple early games that couldn't go wrong, but when everyone else jumped on board, the results were often far too clumsy for the controller. And it feels like that with the Leap Motion.

Dropchord is probably the best-performing of the games, thanks to not needing that much detail in your movement, but still glitches around. Others can just feel futile, ultimately, and things like the painting tools just seem miles away from true usefulness. Not only is precision with your finger movements almost impossible with nothing to offer resistance, but the balance between how close you have to hold the finger to draw and how close you have to hold it to just move the cursor is so hard to maintain.

The funny thing is, the HP Envy Leap Motion has a touchscreen. And a lot of the gesture-based stuff could be achieved on it with less frustration. Leap Motion is cool, but unless it's implemented in the most basic (and, arguably, gimmicky) fashion, it felt superfluous to us.

Even ignoring the Leap Motion, though, this isn't at the head of the pack for general usability. The trackpad seems to sometimes have issues registering clicks totally consistently – a problem we found with the HP Envy TouchSmart 15, too. Occasionally – and too often – we'd find ourselves trying both tapping-to-click and actually clicking to little effect. Then it would be fine for a while. Funnily, though, we also found ourselves accidentally choosing things at time when we were just trying to move the mouse. For a machine costing over £1000, it could be pretty frustrating.

The keyboard has some flex under it that's rather irritating, too, but also the keys are just very spongy. These two factors combine to make it rather poor for feedback, though in terms of size and spacing, it's perfectly fine.

There are two other disappointments for the HP Envy Leap Motion, though. First is the hard drive, and though we certainly don't turn our nose up at 1TB of storage in a laptop, we aren't so pleased about the lack of an SSD in what is otherwise a fairly high performance machine.

Microsoft's general optimisations to Windows 8 means it's not so onerous for booting and waking the machine from sleep as it once was to not have an SSD. But if you want to use this for games (as well you might) or other tasks involving large files (like lots of creative apps might involve), it's definitely a speed hit. Still, the trade-off is storage size for storage speed at the moment, so you might prefer the size here.

What's just straight-up poor is the battery life, achieving just 70 minutes in our Battery Eater test. This doesn't have to be the end of the world, since our benchmark is intensive, and perhaps you'll only use it plugged in for gaming or Photoshop/video editing/whatever work.

If you're using the HP Envy Leap Motion for lighter work, you'll get better, of course. Writing this review in Google Docs, so just typing and using the internet, the battery life was more like four hours on a charge.

Still, if what you want is a balance of power and longevity, you're far better off looking at Apple's MacBook Pro range, which will double that battery life for light usage (for more money, admittedly).

A quick note has to go the Beats Audio speakers, which offer some serious loudness, but without the distortion you get from a lot of built-in speakers. You even manage to get some decent stereo separation out of them when sitting square on. They're broad, fairly deep, and a welcome addition.

Verdict

The HP Envy Leap Motion is kind of odd – you'd think the main selling point is right there, in the name. The Leap Motion controller appears built into a laptop for the first time ever here, and is clearly important to the machine.

Except that, well, no it isn't. Not really. Leap Motion's control technology has yet to break out of the 'sometimes fun gimmick' category, making its inclusion here as much of a distraction as anything.

Think of this as a laptop with a cool new control method and you'll be torn astray, really. Much better to think of it as simply a powerful laptop, even with some solid gaming chops. Ignore the Leap, and focus on the smaller steps: quad-core CPU, strong GPU and bags of RAM in reasonably attractive bundle.

There's space for a machine like the HP Envy Leap Motion – for example, you still get people who'd say they want a 17-inch MacBook Pro, when the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display offers a lot of power and desktop resolution. This is an option for them, and a smart price.

Well, the price is largely good, but we still find ourselves drawn to HP's own TouchSmart 15 laptop. It has a slightly stronger processor, a weaker graphics card, but more RAM – but it's £400 less. Perhaps the key thing, though, is the Envy Leap Motion's screen – it's a lot higher-quality than the TouchSmart 15's, even though it's the same resolution.

If you are looking for a creative pro laptop for a reasonable price, this one lacks portability, but offers power and the kind of display you want, even if it isn't market-leading.

We liked

The HP Envy Leap Motion offers a good amount of power in a decently-sized chassis. It's fairly smart-looking, and with a quad-core Core i7 processor, 12GB of RAM and Nvidia 750M graphics card, it's a good media-creation machine.

The screen is very good too, and with the Blu-ray drive, it also makes a fair media-consumption laptop. The Beats Audio speakers and large hard drive also help here.

We disliked

Sadly, the Leap Motion controller doesn't do enough to prove a useful addition, and it makes us wonder if this couldn't have been a better value machine without it. Yes it would have lost its unique selling point, but we think being a smart, powerful 17-inch laptop isn't bad on its own.

As it stands, the price is awfully close to some gaming laptops that can be a little chunkier, but that feature even more powerful graphics cards.

The battery life is also very poor indeed, and the total lack of SSD is a shame – ultimately, it will affect boot and wake times over the life of the machine.

Final Verdict

HP's Envy line has had recent ups and downs, but it seems to have found its feet recently. Being (and looking like) a lower-cost alternative to a MacBook Pro-like machine is no bad thing – especially for people who want that kind of power without the cost.

While the Leap Motion controller doesn't add much to the package, it's still not a bad machine overall anyway, especially in the oft-neglected 17-inch category. However, it's well worth looking at the HP Envy TouchSmart 15 if you are considering this laptop, because it's a lot cheaper for almost as much power.

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