HP's latest back-to-school offering is an exciting laptop for those who want to keep it light. The Aero 13, while from the Pavillion stable, looks and feels like a more premium product and borders on the Envy and Spectre lines of HP instead.

The most striking feature of this laptop is the weight. At less than a kilogram, it is incredibly light. One would have assumed the materials used for this would be plastic, but on the contrary, this is a magnesium alloy body and looks and feels good. With four exciting colours ranging from natural silver to pale rose gold, the options are plenty.

Behind the good looks of the laptop is the power of the Ryzen CPU. The unit we received had a Ryzen 5 with a Radeon graphics card and was quite snappy. It handled most tasks we threw at it quite with ease. It did help that there was 16GB of onboard RAM.

The screen format is a 16:10 aspect ratio and is ideal for most types of content. The screen is WUXGA and quite bright, rated at about 400 nits. The bezels all around are quite tiny giving the feeling of more screen available to watch which is quite pleasing. The camera used is an HP wide vision HD cam which provides a good picture and angle for those long calls that we all need to attend to these days.

While the speakers are B&O, the sound is not all that great. One reason for this would be that there is a large speaker at the base of the laptop with two smaller speakers on the sides. When placed on a flat surface the sound does get a little better but as the laptop is so light, one is tempted to use it on the lap or on other surfaces which may not be as flat and the sound does get a bit muffled.

For ports and connectivity, there is a single USB-C port that can be used for charging but is ideally used for a display or other USB-C devices, two USB-A ports, an HDMI port, the AC adapter port and a combined headphone and microphone port.

A full-sized keyboard along with a large touchpad are both comfortable to use. While the keyboard is full-sized and has large letters on it, for some reason I kept hitting the wrong keys and this is when I am a touch typist and usually don't look down at the keyboard while typing. I guess one would get used to it, but it was strange.

On the software side, the laptop comes with Windows 10 Home edition and a whole bunch of bloatware. The useful components being Microsoft Office (Home and Student edition) and Dropbox with 25GB for one year.

The 3-cell lithium-ion 43Wh battery easily provides 8-10 hours of usage, making it last through most of the day.

In all, the laptop is a good choice for students and business executives. Not quite the workhorse needed by creative professionals but will certainly meet the needs of many users.

Price: ₹ 79,999/-

Pros: Super light, Vibrant screen, Good performance

Cons: Bloatware installed, Slightly expensive, No touchscreen

Published on September 17, 2021