About the HP Folio 13 UltraBook

HP offered us the chance to review an HP Folio 13 UltraBook, and to give away another one to you.

Enter the giveaway at Sharing the HP Folio 13, deadline is Friday! (June 15, 2012)

I’m a sucker for a great keyboard.

I’ve worked with the Folio 13 for a couple of weeks now, and I find it an excellent and practical tool.

Almost any UltraBook could serve the basic functions that make it so handy: small, light, long battery life, and good wifi. I used it away from my desk. I held a Google Hangout from my front porch with it. I hauled it to New York City for BlogWorld Expo. (It was cool to leave the power adapter in my hotel room. With 9 hours of battery life, I never got close to using it all in a conference day.)

The HP shines over others with a good-looking design, a cool underside, and an excellent keyboard. I’m still impressed by the cool underside each time I use it on my lap. And as much as I write, the keyboard matters a lot. The touch pad is the only pain point so far: the buttons are too stiff, and I keep moving the cursor when I let my wrists touch the touch pad while I’m typing.

Call me a nerd, but I like the F keys arrangement. By default, they operate the hardware functions, like the keyboard light, the volume, and the screen brightness. To use them as F keys, you hold down Fn first. (Since we don’t use F keys all that much anymore, makes perfect sense to me.)

HP gets big bonus points for squeezing in room for the ports that matter most in my working world: ethernet for times when wifi bogs down, HDMI out for presentations, and an SD card slot for my photos. It can also use Intel’s WiDi for wireless display through compatible TV adapters, if I ever run into one.

New UltraBooks are rolling out this summer, but having been hands on with the Folio 13, I can tell you it’s definitely capable enough for my laptop needs.

The Folio 13 was provide to me by HP for my review and for me to keep. The agency was Edelman Digital.

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About Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.