Calgary (AB) - Voodoo, the boutique end of HP, has been designing crazy computers for a while, and HP’s almost unlimited resources have now allowed it to make an even crazier laptop. We first wrote about the ultra-portable Envy 133 back on June 10th and now take a closer look at Voodoo’s MacBook Air-killer.
With Envy 133, it seems that the engineers wanted to swing for the fences because the notebook is completely built out of carbon fiber, and the way how engineers got multi-touch touchpad to work is just madness. As you can see in the gallery, both the speakers and touchpad are set inside of drilled carbon fiber.
Sadly, just like Apple MacBook Air, HP-Voodoo did not use the latest hardware for the job (5th generation or Intel Centrino 2), but it is relying on older, 4th generation of Centrino platform (Santa Rosa). However, the number of innovations is just impressive. For instance, Ethernet connection is implemented in a power supply brick and acts as Wi-Fi Access Point - which is nothing short of brilliant.
For such a thin notebook, we did not expect anything larger than the included 3-cell battery, but we hope that HP will offer 6-cell Battery extender. Current maximum life is set around 3h 10min, which is unsuitable for a road warrior. My personal wish is to have an 8-10 hour battery life, regardless of the price paid for that external battery.
The only serious complaint is that designers placed the power button in top right corner, which is usually reserved for Delete key. According to Mark from HP, you would need to press the key for two seconds before anything would happen, but still - it is far from ideal placement. We hope to see that one fixed either in future revisions, or through a software update that would enable us to remap the key.
