HP Pavilion TouchSmart SleekBook Review

I have something special for you all. Today we will be laying hands on the affordable and fondle-friendly HP Pavilion touchSmart SleekBook. It’s a consumer level Windows 8 laptop powered by one of AMD’s new APU (accelerated processing units). Microsoft’s new LiveTile-laden OS is a solid performer and relatively intuitive. But unless you have a touchscreen monitor or laptop display, users typically make a beeline for the tried and true desktop UI–circumventing one of the cooler features of the operating system. That being the touch functionality.

The HP Pavilion TouchSmart SleekBook is a 15in laptop on paper. It’s housed in shiny black plastic. The replete use of plastics is rather striking in this instance. It’s very high gloss and densely speckled with what looks like glitter. It gives the lap warmer a more jovial and original look than your typical black laptop or RFID tag. It features a comfortable and responsive keypad with a nicely textured trackpad positioned below the keyboard off-center to the left. The power button is a chrome sliver up to the top left. Unfortunately the keyboard keys are not backlit. So take care when typing in the dark. Finally, most of the ports are found on the right side with a single USB port and headphone jack on the left.

The HP Pavilion TouchSmart SleekBook is packing a capable yet average set of innards. Again the processor is an AMD breed. HP has chosen the AMD Quad-Core A8-4555m clocked at 1.6Ghz. It’s capable of reaching 2.5ghz and uses a 4MB L2 cache. The GPU side of things is powered by an HD 7500G Discrete-Class graphics chip. That pushes the 15.6 inch backlit LED display to produce a underwhelming 1366 x 768 resolution. The resulting image is nice. But at this stage anything below 1600 x 900 is wholly questionable. Storage capacity maxes out at 750GB for its 7200rpm HDD. But there is a multi-format digital card reader to expand your storage options. We also have 6GB of internal memory. Yet customization and upgrade are available. You can upgrade HDD and memory.

Other notable hardware features include a high performance Dolby powered Altec Lansing speaker system. Audio sounds great unassisted and even comes close to the Beats Audio inclusion on older HP laptop and AiO systems. Connectivity options include 2 USB 3.0, 1 USB 2.0, a single HDMI port, RJ45 network port and the headphone jack mentioned above, which functions as a headphone and mic jack so you can use earbuds or headphones with inline mice like those found on mobile device audio solutions. There is also 802.11b/g/n WLAN radio for WiFi connectivity. But the TouchSmart SleekBook is missing any Bluetooth support.

This is a decidedly better Win8 experience than some of the non-touchscreen solutions we tested. Window 8 is still very familiar stuff with the Charm Bar and Start button. Obviously this is not Windows 8.1. But the touch interface is flawless. It adds value and fun to the inherent touch functionality. It’s interesting to watch children and those with special needs–both young and old–intuitively navigate around the touch UI–resizing windows and snapping applications to the desktop. It’s neat stuff! Some of us have more preternatural tactile sense than others and Windows 8, with touch equipped, caters to this admirably.

Moreover, HP has tossed in some of their home-brewed applications. Onboard is HP CoolSense to monitor temps, HP MyRoom is a cool app for video calling and file/image sharing when paired with HP TrueVsion and HP Webcam. You can also protect your SleekBook’s contents with ProtectSmart for safe peace of mind.

Visa's PayWave, MasterCard's PayPass, American Express' ExpressPay and Discover's Zip card are just a few of the cards with radio-frequency-identification, or RFID, chips built into them. These are not the only charge cards with RFID. Others are on offer in traditional and RFID form, allowing consumers to choose which they want. As of two years ago, there were 35 million chip cards in use in the U.S., according to The Nilson Report, an industry newsletter.

Instead of the standard checkout, where you swipe your card and wait for a receipt, RFID card users simply swipe the card by a designated reader -- if one is available -- and go. Although these readers are not yet in wide distribution, they are becoming much more common.

Unfortunately, this convenience comes at a cost -- it's easy to steal data from the cards. An inexpensive credit card reader can get at the data from a few inches away, even if the card is in a purse or wallet. So a crook can put the reader in a brief case, sidle up to someone and steal data undetected. There are also apps that make it possible to do this using nothing more than a smartphone.

Credit card issuers have taken steps to combat this in a number of ways. These include having security codes that change after every use, which limits damage to one fraudulent transaction. Some also use additional security questions. However, researchers are divided on how effective this is. At last year's Shmoocon hacker conference, Kristin Paget of Recursion Ventures did a demonstration on stage in which she stole data from an RFID card and then used it for a purchase.

Still, the Smart Card Alliance says it has yet to see a verifiable report of data theft from an RFID card. Moreover, the biggest threat to credit card data is theft from a database. Hackers are much more interested in stealing data on the wholesale rather than individual level.

Click on their website www.smartcardfactory.com for more information.