HP 350 G1 (Customizable)

The HP 350 G1 is basically an old-school non-touchscreen laptop machine with a 15.6-inch 1366×768 anti-glare display, a hard drive with up to 1-Terabyte of storage space, dual memory slots for up to 16GB of RAM, and a DVD burner. As opposed to usually completely sealed ultrabooks and other thin laptops, HDD and RAM are user upgradeable and the laptop also sports a user-removable 4-cell battery.

The HP 350 G1 sports the latest 4th Gen Intel “Haswell” processors, namely the i3, i5, i7, as well as entry-level Pentium and Celeron CPU options. The provided CPUs are ultra-low voltage, meaning better power efficiency but also lower performance than on the standard-voltage parts. They included chips have built-in integrated Intel HD / HD 4400 series graphics. For audio, there’s a pair of stereo speakers and DTS Sound technology, while for connectivity and networking there are, three USB ports, both HDMI and VGA video outputs, an SD card reader, Wi-Fi, Gigabit LAN, and optional Bluetooth. As usual, a webcam is included.

All these features are packed into a fairly thin 0.9″ chassis and the overall weight of the system is reasonably light: 5.1 pounds.

Backlight for the chiclet keyboard is missing, but it’s good to see there’s a dedicated keypad for numeric data input as well as a layer of Mylar film underneath the keyboard for protection against minor spills.

What’s also missing are advanced security features like Trusted Platform Module encryption chip and manageability features such as Intel vPro technology, which is convenient for system admins who manage many PCs. Therefore, the 350 G1 appears to be more suitable for work in small business than enterprise environments.

On the positive side, Windows versions are the business-friendly 7 and 8 Pro.