HP's New Laptops And Desktops: Made For Students, Gamers, Everyone

HP has some new PCs for you to ogle, including a reinvented Pavilion X2 tablet-laptop hybrid, a new Envy laptop, and the Envy Phoenix gaming desktop. It’s a big makeover for the company’s line-up, laptops especially, and if you’re looking for a new machine to take to school or uni then your interest should be piqued.

Pavilion: New X2, X360 And All-In-Ones

The Pavilion name represents HP’s mainstream PC line-up; these are the machines that you’d be buying for your kid’s school work or for a uni student on a budget. First in the line-up is a new and improvedPavilion X2, built around a 10-inch display (with 11 hours of battery life) in a tablet form factor that’s magnetically attached to the keyboard base. The tablet has a plethora of ports for such a small device, with full-size USB 3.0, USB Type-C (for charging and data transfer), microHDMI and a microSD card slot. Its side-mounted stereo speakers carry the Bang & Olufsen logo, as part of a new partnership with the Danish audio brand.

You’ll find an Intel Atom inside, Windows 8.1 (upgradeable to 10, obviously, in a week or two), 2GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD. The new HP Pavilion X2 kicks off at around a $549 starting price. If a detachable isn’t your speed, then there’s also a new 11-inch Pavilion X360‘ — same basic hardware, but ditching the removable tablet and keyboard base for a 360-degree rotating hinge — for $150 or so more than the X2 at a $699 starting price. You can also buy a $999 version with a low-voltage Core M inside.

New regular ol’ 15-inch HP Pavilion notebooks — in a huge range of configurations, but starting from an absolute bargain basement price of $499 — will be trickling out onto store shelves, and into HP’s online store soon. Home or small business users might be happier with a proper desktop PC, like the newPavilion AIO, which comes in both 23 and 27-inch screen sizes, again with B&O speakers — this time in a quad-speaker array — and a bunch of different Intel and AMD-based system configurations, with the 23-inch model starting at $1299 and the 27-inch model starting at $1899. And, finally, there’s new Paviliondesktop PC towers.