HP Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000 review: A budget 11.6-inch touchscreen laptop that runs at a snail's pace
HP’s Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000 is one the smallest, lightest, and least expensive notebooks we’ve ever reviewed. It’s also one of the slowest, finishing dead last on nearly every criterion in our five-system roundup except two important ones: weight and battery life.
Despite carrying a price tag of just $410, this Pavilion has a touchscreen. It measures just 11.6 inches, but delivers ten-point touch and the same 1366-by-768-pixel resolution as the other budget notebooks we looked at. Once you get over its diminutive size, you realize that the display is actually pretty good. Though it has a minor issue with vertical off-axis viewing, it’s much better than the screen on the Toshiba T Satellite L55Dt-A5253. Augmenting the Pavilion’s touchscreen is a trackpad that supports Windows 8 gestures such as two-finger scrolling, zoom, and rotate. Mechanical right and left mouse buttons are situated beneath the pad.
Apart from its small size, the Pavilion doesn’t look like a cheap PC. Though its case is composed almost entirely of plastic, the finishes on the lid and chassis are dead ringers for brushed aluminum, and the computer feels very sturdy despite being just 0.86 inch thick. Although this laptop was one of the lightest we considered for our roundup, its 3.4-pound heft is not especially impressive for its overall size.
If you have large fingers, you won’t like the reduced size of the Pavilion’s non-backlit keyboard. The keys are only slightly smaller than average, but the difference drove me crazy during touch-typing sessions. The laptop is too small to accommodate a numeric keypad, too—and I loathe its arrow keys’ design. Rather than laying them out in the familiar inverted T formation, HP made the right and left keys oversize, and the up and down keys half-size—and bookended by the other two.
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