HP EliteBook 2170p Pro Reviews

Don't be fooled by looks: this Ultrabook for business from HP packs plenty of speed and nice features into a retro design.

The HP EliteBook 2170p is a well-designed business ultraportable with a terrific keyboard and a solidly resilient chassis, and its reasonable priced and good feature set make it worthy of consideration.

The EliteBook 2170p may be a pricey and meaty-around-the-hips departure from the ultrabook norm, but we can't imagine too many traveling execs who wouldn't like to carry a compact, good-looking model like this one. Still, this machine is something of an odd beast: a chunky, decidedly IT-first machine in a world trending towards bring-your-own-device (BYOD) consumerization and slim, trim ultraportables and ultrabooks. If you're shopping for a small go-ready laptop for an entire department, the EliteBook 2170p should definitely be on your list of models to consider closely. The abundance of business-friendly features, the easily swappable internals, and the ubiquitous docking capabilities make a fleet of HP EliteBooks an attractive prospect for enterprise buyers. Performance is solid, the battery life is great, and that three-year warranty is mighty enticing. And the magnesium chassis feels like it could take some licks.

The EliteBook line is long overdue for an update. Today, when placed alongside modern Ultrabooks, the 2170p looks and feels ancient. It’s thick, it’s bulky, and it lacks a responsive solid-state drive. These traits make it a poor alternative to any number of consumer Ultrabooks on the market. Even business users have a better option in the Lenovo X230, which beats the 2170p in almost every category. The only advantage we can give to the EliteBook is its software suite, which is now more intuitive and more useful than Lenovo’s increasingly confusing ThinkVantage software. Perhaps this laptop’s most glaring flaw is its price. Even a downgraded model that ships with only a Core i3 processor sells for about $950 at online retailers and $999 on HP’s own site. That’s way too much for an 11-inch laptop that doesn’t have an SSD and is much thicker than most of its competitors. We hope that the next EliteBook to come to our office will be a sleek, revised model that takes design lessons from HP’s excellent HP Envy 15 and HP Envy 14 Spectre. The current line just can’t compete with today’s best.

Initially we asked the question: how should a mini EliteBook look, adhering to the quality standard of the series? Half of this and half of that would be the answer. Case, input devices, and run times meet the high expectations. What amazes us: after the throttling problems of the 14-inch sister model 8460p (2011) now even the smallest member of the series comes without any such performance losses. Performance is perhaps the right topic to at least partially justify the high price of the EliteBook. The Core i7-3667U is the fastest ULV processor (2nd quarter 2012) and under multi CPU load it runs constantly at 2.8 GHz (Single: 3.0 GHz). It is remarkable for the cooling system of an 11.6-inch notebook to keep the chassis under load not considerably warmer than in idle. In addition, we have the Micron RealSSD C400, a 256 GB SSD, which catapults the 2170p among the fastest application performers. The input devices of the smallest EliteBook are state of the art. HP proves that the high typing comfort and practicality should not be strange to the 11.6-inch form factor. The Display- and the Docking-Port as well as the SmartCard reader match the business setting well. No other 11.6-inch notebook of the competitors offers these interfaces.