Unboxing the new HP Star Wars Special Edition laptop (hands-on)
The HP Star Wars Special Edition Notebook includes custom graphics and icons, plus built-in photos and art, and even custom Star Wars styrofoam inserts inside the box.
- Author of the award-winning, NY Times-reviewed nonfiction book The Tetris Effect; Longtime consumer technology expert for CBS Mornings
Editors' note, November 24, 2015: Updated with new unboxing and hands-on photos and impressions.
The HP Star Wars Special Edition Notebook is here, and we've updated this hands-on preview with an unboxing gallery, showing off all the cool art and design features of the system and its packaging.
For a laptop that starts at a very reasonable $699, the Star Wars Notebook is surprisingly upscale-feeling, with a matte finish that rejects fingerprints. The all-over graphics printed directly on the chassis are subtle but provide good fan service, and everyone's favorite part of the design is the vintage X-wing targeting computer overlay on the touch pad.
The built-in galleries and Star Wars assets are all built into an included app called the Star Wars Command Center. From it, you can choose from several sets of rotating desktop background images, including classic on-set photos, images from the new "The Force Awakens" film, and even storyboard images. A gallery section allows you to flip through more than 1,100 images in the Windows photo gallery.
If you're a Star Wars fan and also in the market for a reasonably priced mainstream 15-inch laptop, there's only a slight price premium here for all the extras. HP sells a similarly configured Pavilion 15 laptop for $639, just $70 less. (Note that, during the Black Friday and holiday shopping season, that plain-looking Pavilion model is temporarily deeply discounted, down to $439.)
We're currently running benchmark and battery tests on the Star Wars Special Edition laptop in the CNET Labs, so stay tuned for a full review soon. Our original hands-on preview continues below.
With Star Wars mania hitting "Phantom Menace"-like levels of hype during the run-up to " The Force Awakens," it's no surprise that Star Wars branding is turning up everywhere. And while many fans have adorned their laptops and desktop PCs with Star Wars stickers and decals before, this is the first fully branded Star Wars laptop we've seen.
The HP Star Wars Special Edition Notebook is a specially designed take on the well-known HP Pavilion series of mainstream laptops. Under custom art covering nearly the entire chassis is a standard HP Pavilion 15-inch laptop. It may not be the most exciting or high-end laptop HP offers, but the mainstream components and plastic construction also help keep the cost down to a reasonable level for fans.
From the outside, however, it looks very little like a standard
. The company describes it as a battle-worn, distressed design. It's clearly a Dark Side system, with Darth Vader, stormtroopers and other Star Wars bad guys featured on the system's box, back cover and interior tray. Interestingly, there is no Light Side counterpart -- it's evil all the way, with the only nod to the Rebels coming from a background image below the touchpad, showing an X-Wing guidance system readout (like the one Luke Skywalker turns off while traversing the Death Star trenches).Included on the hard drive is a collection of images and assets from the 40-year history of Star Wars, including a databank of 1,100 images, plus Star Wars Windows themes, icons and sounds (for example, the recycle bin has a Death Star icon).
The Star Wars system has a 1,920x1,080 15.6-inch display, with touch as an option. Processors are from Intel's current sixth-generation Core i5 and Core i7 family; RAM can go up to 12GB and storage up to 2TB. Like other 2015 HP laptops, the speakers carry a Bang & Olufsen logo, which means the Danish audio company provided audio-tuning feedback on HP's in-house designs.
This isn't a gaming system, which is a bit of an odd choice, but you can add some midlevel optional graphics to it, topping out at the Nvidia GeForce 940M GPU. That's good enough for low-to-medium settings for most current games, but not what you'll want for something demanding like the upcoming Star Wars: Battlefront game.
The Star Wars Special Edition Notebook starts at $699 in the US. It can be preordered on October 8, and it ships November 8, with international price and availability details to follow. (The US price directly converts to around £460 or AU$970.)