The HP 15 Touchscreen laptop has powerful hardware, including an Intel Core i5 processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. Although it is marketed as a luxury laptop, in terms of performance it falls more towards the mid-range range. Happily, this is reflected in its price.
The laptop itself is quite appealing, and the plastic shell is acceptable enough. It has the power to breeze through typical desktop tasks without much effort, and a fantastic keyboard and outstanding trackpad round out its list of advantages.
Design and Aesthetics
The HP 15 Touchscreen laptop looks similar to other HP i5 touch laptops in terms of appearance. The chassis has a matte black surface, while the top and underside have a somewhat beautiful silver finish.
With a weight of 4.99 pounds, this laptop cannot be mistaken for being lightweight, and because of its size, desks may be a better option than laps for it. But, there are advantages to this. The HP 15 Touchscreen Laptop has a very sturdy construction, extremely robust hinges, and when we flipped open the lid, the screen only slightly flexed. You’ll get the idea that this laptop is strong enough to tough out a few scrapes just a few minutes of touching it.
Despite all of that, the plastic casing of the laptop is the clearest sign that some compromises were necessary to lower the price. The screen, despite its size, is fairly ordinary, as we have mentioned. Even though it won’t break any records, the touchscreen is fairly good, but the bezels around the screen seem overly huge.
Access Points and Ports
The ports on the HP 15 Touchscreen laptop are of a decent quality. Two USB Type-A ports, one USB Type-C port, an HDMI port, a headphone/microphone jack, and a microSD card reader are distributed along the laptop’s flanks and are easily accessible from a USB docking station. Up to 5GB per second of data transfer is supported by the USB Type-C. Although it’s a reasonable decision given the price of this laptop, the lack of Thunderbolt connectivity is a major bummer.
The keyboard of the HP 15 Touchscreen laptop is one of its strongest features. The keyboard offers a full-width ten key layout that’s easy to get used to, as well as little flex and sufficient key travel. There is a number pad to make the life of people who like to crunch numbers even easier, and the keys are suitably spaced. All things considered, we enjoyed typing on the keyboard quite a bit, and the backlights allowed us to use it late into the night.
The trackpad performs less well than expected. It has a respectable size and responds well to clicks. Unfortunately, we discovered that it was somewhat unresponsive, and things only got better when we turned up its sensitivity to the maximum setting.
Audio
The laptop’s HD audio stereo speakers are decent, which appears to be the operative word for the entire device. Bang and Olufsen, a Danish audio company, helped tune them. When you stream movies on YouTube or Netflix, you won’t have to strain your ears to pick up music notes or phrases from actors because they are loud enough to fill a small room with sound.
The speakers do a good job of reproducing the high notes, but they have trouble with the low ones. You might need to connect in your headphones if you want to add some bass to your song or set up your own recording studio.
Display
Its 15-inch laptop’s display offers a maximum screen resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels, which isn’t particularly impressive. In actuality, we think it’s the laptop’s biggest letdown.
The panel’s maximum brightness is 224 nits, which is significantly less than the 300 nits average for the sector. Photos, games, and even webpages look somewhat drab and washed out as a result. Moreover, because the screen only uses 62% of the sRGB color gamut, it cannot be used for even the most elementary photo or video editing operations. Although the decent contrast ensures that writing on the screen is still visible and readable even in brilliantly lit environments, watching videos on this screen is similarly not a thrilling experience.
Gaming
By no means is the HP 15 Touchscreen laptop a budget gaming laptop. Just enough power is available from the included Intel UHD graphics card to run older, simpler games at frame rates that are remotely respectable. And after you’ve reduced settings to their bare minimum. This is definitely not the laptop for you if you’re looking for one that can play AAA games, and HP didn’t even advertise it as such.
In addition, it’s difficult to imagine that unimpressive a panel offering sufficient clarity to support a pleasurable gaming experience.
Performance
The HP 15 has powerful internal components (apart from a good GPU, of course), so it can easily handle the majority of common desktop chores. This laptop is a heavyweight champion when it comes to performing standard multimedia, online browsing, and word processing chores.
In our tests, the laptop handled running many open programs (including a spreadsheet) and multiple active Chrome tabs without stuttering. All of them were readily cycled through, and there was no obvious lag.
But, it drew the line at any program that required it to use up all of its graphics resources, including 3D rendering, photo and video editing, and other similar tasks. Although having an otherwise great lineup of components, the integrated Intel GPU is to blame for this; the lack of a more potent graphics setup is a very clear statement from HP that this laptop isn’t intended for much more than daily office work.
Conclusion
The HP 15 Touchscreen laptop is a stylish, fairly powerful laptop. It doesn’t quite fit the definition of a budget laptop, but it does have hardware and features you may expect to see on a more expensive model.
It has a fairly sturdy construction, respectable performance, passable speakers, and a fantastic keyboard. On the other hand, the negatives list is dominated by a drowsy screen, poor battery life, and a lack of true graphical power.
