HP ENVY 17 3D Hands-On

HPs ENVY range of laptops have always been eye-catching, but their latest ENVY 17 3D takes that up a step by packing 3D support too.  We caught up with the 17.3-inch Full HD notebook this week, and it's certainly a beast of a machine: plenty of metal in the chassis, a quadcore Intel Core i7-720QM processor, 2TB of storage and a slot-loading Blu-ray drive.

The 3D system uses HP's active shutter glasses, which – like with some 3D HDTVs – rapidly cycle the transparency of the lenses according to an emitter in the bezel of the notebook.  Graphics are courtesy of an ATI Mobility Radeon 5850 GPU, and there's Beats Audio for sound with power to match.

It's not a machine we'd like to carry around with us daily – it's 7.15lbs of desktop replacement, after all – but the 3D effect works well and the various apps we loaded all opened instantly.  The backlit chiclet keyboard feels solid and, despite the relative slenderness of the chassis, the whole thing is flex-free.  We're waiting to hear back on official pricing ("from £1,599" is the HP line, but this particular machine is spec'd up considerably) but it should drop around the end of this month.