A new entry in Hewlett-Packard Co.‘s (NYSE: HPQ) EliteBook line of commercial-class notebooks, the HP EliteBook 8460p is a little on the weighty side but makes up for it with solid, durable construction.
I like light notebooks, as I have desktop PCs at home and work and so tend to use notebooks primarily when travelling. But I also dislike notebooks that feel cheap: plastic chassis, give in the lid, and so on. While the 8460p is slightly on the weightier side of current generation 14” notebooks at 5.4 lbs, I’m willing to make the tradeoff for a well-constructed notebook that feels solid and not, well, cheap. And the 8460p does look and feel like a quality device with its aluminum finish and glass trackpad.
As mentioned, the 8460p features a 14” matte display, with a high definition Web cam capable of recording 720p video. I’ve become a fan of the chiclet style of keyboard after some typing adjustments, and there is both a trackpad below the keyboard with a set of mouse buttons both above and below it, the ones above probably intended for use with the trackball in the middle of the keyboard. I like the look of the smooth glass trackpad, but for usability I wished it was a little more tactile.
For security purposes, there’s a fingerprint scanner, and hard keys for WiFi, muting audio, the Web cam, and of course power. Beside the Web cam, there’s also a pop-out reading light for working in those low-light situations. Cute, but I think I’d prefer a backlit, illuminated keyboard.
On the left side there’s a DVD drive, SD card and ExpressCard slots, two USB 3.0 ports and a Firewire port, as well as the power jack. Over on the right there’s a USB 2.0/SATA port, another USB 2.0 port, and a DisplayPort port.
Cosmetics aside, how does she perform? I had no problems running and editing video and doing other memory intensive tasks, powered by an Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM and a 1GB AMD Radeon HD 6470M graphics card, with a 320GB hard drive. Battery life was acceptable lasting more than half the business day, depending on usage and settings.
As a commercial class notebook, the 8460p comes with some of HP’s business tools, including some HP ProtectTools security options such as the fingerprint scanner, which worked fine for me. The facial recognition was a bit more finicky though; very lighting sensitive and you need to be perfectly framed by the web cam. A few times I had to resort to swiping my finger to get into Windows.
All in all, priced at $1,229.00 the 8460p is a good addition to HP’s commercial line-up.
Follow Jeff Jedras on Twitter: @JeffJedrasCDN.