HP 14s laptop first impressions.

Laptops under ₹50,000 has been a hot segment and there are a lot of laptops at this price which creates a lot of confusion. Today we have one the HP 14s fr0012au laptop. It is priced in this segment. I have used this laptop for around 5 days and here are my impressions on it and I will share the pros and cons as well which I have noticed in this short tenure. 

BUILD AND DESIGN:

The HP 14s is built of plastic but a good quality one and you will feel it when you will touch it. There is an air outlet at the rear and inlet at the front. Speakers are placed above the keyboards. Touchpad is beneath the keyboard and keyboard itself is a full size one without numeric keypad. It is a small, compact, thin and light laptop. With just 1.45kg weight it is really light weight and portable. On the left, it has a full size SD card reader and some LED indicators whereas on the right, it has a headphone jack, one USB type-c port, 2 USB-A port, a HDMI port and a charging port. There are rubber feats at the bottom for better grip. Hinge is also very durable at the first look. But, it fails to get lifted with a single hand if you really care about. And also, the hinge is limiting i.e. it doesn't open wide enough.

SCREEN:

It carries a 14inch FHD (1980x1080) resolution display and due to this size it is really compact. It is rather a glossy display and not matt and hence will reflect a lot of light. But the screen quality is really great. The colours are well produced and it is well done and is one of the best display at this segment. If you are looking for a laptop for photo editing at this price then you should probably look at this one. Also, the screen goes really bright with 250nits of brightness. The bezel around the screen is fairly thin and is textured. When you talk about multimedia experience the videos will look really great but the front firing speakers are loud but the quality is not up to the mark. I will recommend to use headphones or external speakers with it. 

Glossy screen.

HARDWARE:

HP 14s is powered by AMD Ryzen 5 3450u processor with inbuilt AMD Radeon Vega 8 GPU. It comes with 8GB of RAM out of which 2GB is used by GPU. The Ryzen 5 3450u is a 4 core and 8 thread CPU. This laptop is not meant for gaming but you can do lite gaming on this device. This device is for professionals and students and not for hardcore gamers. It also has a webcam for video calls and is a 720p webcam. The quality is bad like typical laptop camera.

HP 14s when compared to a 15.6inch laptop.

SOFTWARE:

It runs Windows 10 out-of-the-box and also comes with Microsoft Office. The experience for the most part is fine. It was really stable every time I used it. 

KEYBOARD AND TOUCHPAD:

As I mentioned earlier, it is a full sized keyboard without numeric keypad. Keyboard gives good feedback when you type on it. I have typed this whole article on its keyboard and will not cause tiring. The keys are not backlit which is a con. The letters are coloured gray on silver keys hence visibility sometimes becomes a problem. Also, the arrow keys felt a little hard to use due to its placement but you will get used to it. Trackpad is wide but short in height. It is multi-gesture supported and works absolutely fine. It feels good when you touch it. Overall, both keyboard and trackpad is a thumbs up.

Keyboard and trackpad.

BATTERY AND CHARGING:

This machine packs in a 41Whr battery which in first impression lasts around 5 hours on normal internet based usage. One peculiar con we noticed was that when laptop is on sleep it drains out a lot of juice from the battery. The charger is rated at 65 watts and charges through the proprietary charger at the right side of the laptop and takes around 1 hour to get fully charged up.

OTHERS:

Ports on the device (SD card reader is on the other side).

The laptop comes with 1x 8GB DDR4 RAM which is expandable up to 16GB, 512GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD, Bluetooth 4.2, Wi-Fi, etc. There is no fingerprint scanner or Windows hello support. 

Yes, there are some minor cons with the device but I have noticed no major flaws. This is a laptop mostly for students, professionals and those who needs a thin and light laptop.  

I bought this laptop around ₹43,000. The price keeps changing and once touched ₹50,000 on Flipkart. Only get this laptop if the price is around ₹45,000. When you look at the overall laptop it is a good package for that price.

This was just our first impressions and do wait for the review of the same. What do you think about the HP 14s? Do let us know in the comments below. Do follow our blog for more updates.