HP’s Envy laptops are objects of great beauty, but at more than £1,000 apiece they’re out of reach for most people. If you’re feeling a bit short, though, there’s no need to settle for an ugly duckling. HP Pavilion dm3 pulls of the same trick, but for much less cash.

The aluminium lid immediately draws attention to itself, and tilting it back sees the swish, metallic theme continue inside, with the brushed finish pooling around the square keys of a Scrabble-tile keyboard. It looks simply gorgeous and the amazing thing is that at a price of £451 exc VAT, you could buy three of HP’s Pavilion dm3s(pavilion dm3 battery) for the price of just one Envy 13.

The good points don’t stop at its striking looks or surprising affordability. The keyboard, for one, is excellent. Each key has a positive action at the end of each stroke and the wide channels between each key keep typos to a minimum. Even the trackpad is free from issues, the dainty button at its top edge allowing you to disable it for longer stretches of typing.

The price you pay for such a pretty face and competent ergonomics is a slightly cut down core specification. Instead of an Intel processor, HP has chosen AMD.

HP took a minimalist approach to the rest of the design, and it mostly pays off. Like the Inspiron 14z, we like that dm3t skips dedicated multimedia keys and instead uses the top row on the keyboard for controlling playback and quickly adjusting things like brightness and volume—no function commands required. Other welcome touches include a red LED above the mute button (to let you know when it’s activated) and a touchpad lock button that changes from white to red when engaged. We just wish that the power button was up top for easy access; instead, it’s a switch on the right side.

As cool as the hp pavilion dm3 looks, the competition is heating up in this category—fast. Our most recent surprise was the Asus UL80Vt, which costs $10 less than the dm3 and performs considerably better. Its design is less eye-catching, but it gives the dm3 a run for its money. On our PCMark Vantage test, which measures overall system performance, it delivered a score of 2,829, which is below the 3,039 average for this class of laptop and worse than less-expensive competitors like the $799 Asus K40IN (3,317) and the HP ProBook 4310s (3,315). The UL80Vt managed 3,464 on this test. It encoded our 11 iTunes tracks in 6 minutes and 49 seconds (the UL80Vt finished 30 seconds faster, and the Toshiba Satellite U505-S2930 did the same test 2 minutes faster), and it converted our video in Windows Media Encoder in 10 minutes and 23 seconds (both the Asus K40IN and Asus UL80Vt completed the conversion about 3 minutes faster). When we ran that same test with a virus scan running in the background, it required less than an extra minute, which is good. Removing the antivirus software gave a Windows Media Encoder time of 10 minutes and 17 seconds, so at least that constantly-running software doesn’t impact performance much.

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