Putting privacy first, the HP Probook is bristling with features designed to keep prying eyes away from your work. It’s a pretty capable office warrior to boot
The HP ProBook x360 435 range comes powered by AMD’s Ryzen 4000 series of laptop APUs, which promise solid performance without munching through the battery. Announced back in January, these HP ProBook x360 435’s are aimed at business users and come with local security enhancements including a fingerprint scanner, a physical shutter for the camera, and a Sure View privacy-enhancing display. The HP ProBook x360 435 G7 is typical of HP’s business 2-in-1’s; it’s a no-nonsense machine, mostly right angles and square edges, hardly any curves, and the plastic and aluminium chassis has a silvery-grey finish. It’s solid too, with virtually no flex detected in the monitor or the deck. The G7 very much looks and feels like what you’d expect from a business laptop. It resembles a lot of HP’s ProBooks and the HP Elitebook x360s of recent years. If you’ve ever owned or seen one of those, a lot of the design cues, like the vanes for the thermal port on the left-hand side, will be familiar to you. The keyboard is set into a recessed area of the deck and is easy to get comfortable with. The keys are snappy and offer just the right amount of travel for a laptop. The backlit keycaps also have a nice, slightly textured matt finish. The only quibble here is that the arrow keys are bunched up in the bottom right corner, and there are no dedicated nav keys (‘Home’, ‘End’, ‘Page Up/Down’). Rather, the arrow keys double up as nav keys, when you hold down Function. The trackpad too is solid and sturdy, no tell-tale signs of wobble here. It’s also very responsive, so much so that it had to be taken down a notch in the settings. The hinges, which let you flip the HP ProBook x360 435 G7 over and prop it up in tent mode, or use it as a tablet, also feel rock solid. All of this robust design and rigidity means that the ProBook x360 435 G7 is a tad on the heavy side. It weighs around 1.45kg – a hair above the Dell XPS 13 9300 (1.27kg) – but still not as hefty as the Microsoft Surface Book 3 (1.9kg). The G7’s display measures 13.3-inches corner to corner and has a typical Full HD (1920×1080) resolution within a 16:9 aspect ratio. The spec sheet promises a peak brightness of 400 nits, but we recorded 349 nits at the most. That’s just about punchy enough for working in most lighting conditions, mind. The display uses IPS (in-plane switching) technology, which should – in theory – allow for good viewing angles, but that’s not really what you get here. Discolouration starts to creep in at 45 degrees along the horizontal and almost immediately when you tilt the screen forwards or backwards. And that’s even when the Sure View privacy filter is turned off. Similar to the filters used by cash machines, Sure View – toggled with the F2 key – makes it virtually impossible for anyone sitting next to you to see what’s on your screen. Of course, it being the year 2020 AD, when most of us are hopefully working from the safety of our homes, this might not be the most in-demand feature for right now, so just think ahead to those future long commutes and coffee shop remote working sessions.
