Why You Can Trust CNET HP Pavilion TX1219AU review: HP Pavilion TX1219AU
The HP Pavilion TX1219 is great as a normal day to day business notebook, and not so great at being a tablet. Still the price is hard to ignore and it is an attractive machine -- so you could do worse than getting one of these.
The HP Pavilion TX1219 interestingly has written on the chassis that it is an "HP Pavilion Entertainment PC". There are a number of things that fly in the face of this (poor screen, old and weak video card, no digital video out), but presumably can get away with it because HP bundles in Altec Lansing speakers, a remote and includes their own media centre software ("QuickPlay"). Unlike other vendors however, there seems not to be a lightweight media client that can load without Windows, to save on battery.
HP Pavilion TX1219AU
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
More sensibly it's been classified officially by HP as a travel/mobility notebook, meaning it is well suited to business use. As an added bonus, it also happens to be a tablet PC.
Design
Inscribed with a recurring "fingerprint" style design in silver and black, and with HP's distinctive dimpled trackpad, the TX is a notch above what enterprise users generally get to display in front of their peers. Vexingly as tends to be the case these days the whole thing is high sheen, meaning you'll be forever cleaning fingerprints off.
Unlike some competing models the screen only twists clockwise when converting to tablet mode, but the hinge feels strong and well built, the Altec Lansing speakers flanking either side. The monitor is locked shut when in closed and tablet positions, a button on the lip needing to be pressed to release it. The tablet pen is stowed away at the front right, and is pushed in to release, although in practice the laptop wanted to hang on to the pen a little too much, making it difficult to remove easily.
The 12.1-inch, 1,280x800 screen never quite reaches a high level of brightness even when powered from the wall, and has a greasy vaseline look about it. This, combined with tablet sensitivity is the only real gripe we have about this notebook.
The keyboard has been compressed, but never once felt too small and our fingers in typing tests didn't mis-hit any more than on a desktop keyboard -- even the extremely tiny tilde key didn't present a problem.
The hot air vent sits on the right side, meaning lefties get a reprieve for a change while the right handed population gets a cooked hand if using an external mouse. Another vent is situated at the back.
Features
For a 12.1-inch notebook the TX1219 is well featured, containing a DVD burner, card reader (SD/MS/MMC/XD), express card 34, three USB ports, Ethernet, modem and VGA/S-video out. Sadly missing is any form of digital video out.
A fingerprint scanner is on the left of the monitor, while at the top sits dual microphones and a 1.3MP Webcam, to the right are quick access buttons for QuickPlay, while at the bottom buttons access Windows Mobility Center and rotate the screen.
The front lip features dual headphone jacks, a microphone jack and infrared receiver (for which a remote is included), the wireless on/off switch and the power button.
Internet Explorer once again displays HP's tendency to cross-brand with search engines, the default engine set to Yahoo, yet the Google toolbar installed. We'd prefer neither.
Unfortunately a lot of other unwanted crapware has turned up as well, including sign up programs for Dodo internet and Bigpond, a link to eBay , sign up for "Mediaring Talk" (a VoIP program), and White and Yellow Pages. Fortunately these can be easily nuked with impunity, but we always find it annoying that once again the desktop has become the new advertising space.
On the specs front it's reasonably well equipped -- a 2.2GHz Turion64 X2 processor, 2GB RAM and 160GB hard drive are included. Sadly this start is let down by its graphics card -- the crippled GeForce 6150. This notebook definitely won't be used for anything other than business. Wireless A/B/G is included, with the option to upgrade to Draft-N, and Bluetooth is also there for your device needs.
Performance
Day to day tasks like Web browsing, word processing and Excel spreadsheets provided no challenge for the TX1219 -- indeed, we'd be surprised if any notebook had issues with such basic applications these days, and really this is the aim of this notebook.
On the graphics front as expected it suffered supremely, scoring 151 in 3DMark06, while making it up slightly on the application front in PCMark05, scoring 2684.
Turning off all power saving features, setting the screen brightness to maximum and playing back a DVD the four cell battery lasted a not so efficient 59 minutes, 25 seconds.
From a tablet perspective the screen is a touchscreen, meaning that you can use pretty much anything to navigate rather than just the pen. Unfortunately the screen was nowhere near sensitive enough and offered nothing in terms of adjusting this, forcing us to use slow and deliberate strokes when writing, completely undermining the point of being a tablet.
The HP Pavilion TX1219 is great as a normal day to day business notebook, and not so great at being a tablet. Still the price is hard to ignore and it is an attractive machine -- so you could do worse than getting one of these.