HP ProBook 5310m

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If the slender designs of the Dell Adamo, HP Envy 13, and Apple MacBook Pro pique your interest but their price tags leave you cold, turn your attention to the new HP ProBook 5310m. Wrapped in a sleek aluminum-and-magnesium chassis but priced like a budget laptop—$699 in its basic configuration, $899 in the one we tested—the ProBook 5310m redefines what you can expect from an affordable 13-inch ultraportable. It delivers good performance and excellent battery life, along with plenty of features to attract road warriors.

The ProBook 5310m’s squared-off chassis is 0.93 inch thick and features a sharp-looking aluminum lid and a magnesium-alloy base. The two materials combine to make a shell that is rigid yet lightweight—just 3.8 pounds—and a welcome departure from the plastic bodies of most other budget machines. As with most other 13-inch ultraportables (which we define as machines that weigh less than 4 pounds), the thin chassis means there’s no room for an optical drive inside. HP also had to make some sacrifices when it came to ports. The VGA-out connector business users will need for most presentation devices was too big, so HP went with a DisplayPort jack and offers a DisplayPort-to-VGA dongle for $29. Not ideal, but it gets the job done.

You will find, however, two dedicated buttons to the right of the keyboard that make the ProBook 5310m stand out. The first is for the HP QuickLook 2 feature: Hit the button when the PC is off or in hibernation, and you can access your contacts and calendar without having to boot to Windows. HP has augmented that with the second button, the new QuickWeb button. Press that button when the PC is off, and the HP QuickWeb Browser launches to your home page in about 20 seconds, no Windows required.

What's more, this is no stripped-down utility and browser. It includes familiar tool-tray icons in the lower right corner for configuring your Wi-Fi or LAN connection, as well as for detecting and selecting a network. HP even remembered to include a brightness control for the screen and a battery-level indicator, so you don’t run out of juice—unusually deep functionality for a preboot environment. The browser supports tabs and has all the features you would expect, including Bookmarks, History and Recent Pages lists, and a zoom control. We watched streaming video on CNN.com, checked our Gmail account, and, of course, surfed ComputerShopper.com and found that pages loaded quickly and accurately.

Given the slender design and low price, we were expecting the “but” with the ProBook 5310m to be its performance. That may be the case with the entry-level $699 configuration (which includes a 1.2GHz Celeron processor), but the $899 model we tested ("FM997UT" is the exact part number) includes a 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SP9300 CPU and 2GB of fast DDR3 SDRAM, both of which helped deliver very good performance for an ultraportable notebook in this price range.

We moved on to test the battery life. (In our test, we have the laptop stream video over the Web until it's depleted.) The runtime from the standard four-cell battery such as Hp Pavilion DV1000 battery(Hp dv1000 battery), Hp PF723A battery, Hp PM579A battery, Hp Pavilion DV4000 battery(Hp dv4000 battery) , Hp Pavilion ZE2000 battery(Hp ze2000 battery), compaq Presario M2000 battery(compaq m2000 battery) (the only one offered) was a highlight of this laptop: 3 hours and 47 minutes, which is about 15 minutes more than the average for this class of laptop, though well shy of the 5 hours and 13 minutes its Asus UL30A-A1 competitor mustered.

Next up: our 3D-graphics testing. The results were less compelling than the battery life, though no surprise, due to the integrated Mobile Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics engine. The ProBook 5310m scored 1,024 on our 3DMark06 test at 1,024x768 resolution. That’s actually better than the average score for the class (990), but still not enough for any high-end gaming. Our test game title, Company of Heroes, had trouble loading on this laptop, but from past experience we know that a score of around 1,000 on 3DMark06 will translate into an unplayable frame rate of around 12 frames per second on that game’s performance test.

In addition to the 32-bit Windows 7 Professional operating system and QuickLook and QuickWeb utilities, the ProBook 5310m comes preloaded with a fairly minimal software mix: Roxio Creator Business 10.3, WinZip, Skype, and the ubiquitous trial version of Microsoft Office 2007. You also get the handy HP System Diagnostics tool and HP ProtectTools suite, which includes utilities for permanently deleting files or wiping the hard drive and protecting your passwords. Also included in the package is standard-length warranty coverage: a one-year plan with 24/7 toll-free tech support.

All told, the HP ProBook 5310m is all you could ask for in an under-$1,000 ultraportable. The QuickWeb and QuickLook features are ideal if you often steal a few minutes here and there to check e-mail and the Web, and the compact body and good battery life make it an ideal travel companion.