HP Star Wars Special Edition Notebook review: HP's Star Wars laptop takes you to the Dark Side, for less.

Star Wars hype is everywhere, and the light and dark sides of the Force can be found emblazoned on everything from coffee mugs to clothing -- basically anything that can be imprinted with an image and sold in stores.

7.8

HP Star Wars Special Edition Notebook

The Good

The Star Wars designs covering this laptop look great, and the system is packed with digital content extras. It doesn't cost more than a standard 15-inch HP laptop.

The Bad

Battery life is on the short side, and the optional Nvidia graphics card isn't what Star-Wars-loving gamers would want for new games.

The Bottom Line

HP has created a fun piece of fan service with the Star Wars Special Edition Notebook, marrying Star Wars content to a reasonably priced mainstream 15-inch laptop.

Add to this never-ending collection of sci-fi ephemera the new HP Star Wars Special Edition Notebook, a 15-inch laptop covered head to toe in familiar images of Darth Vader and friends. Under the distinctive paint job and handful of digital extras, this is actually a fairly stock midlevel 15-inch HP laptop, similar to what you'd find in HP's Pavilion 15.

That means this isn't a high-end gaming system, carved from aluminum and with glossy edge-to-edge glass over a 4K display. But, it also means you can get a very cool piece of Star Wars memorabilia that also functions as an everyday mainstream laptop at a perfectly reasonable price of $699 in the US (£549 in the UK and AU $1,299 in Australia).

For that base price, you get a current-gen Intel Core i5 CPU, 6GB of RAM and a 1TB mechanical hard drive. Include the extras found here, such as a backlit keyboard, DVD drive and faster 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and a stock HP Pavilion 15-inch laptop configured as closely as possible is also just around $699, so there's not really a premium to pay for the Star Wars design and content. But, at various times during the holiday shopping season, I've seen some pretty steep discounts on the non-Star Wars version, as much as $150 less, so keep an eye out for sales.

Besides the Star Wars graphics covering the exterior, the system includes a healthy collection of digital extras for fans, including Windows background images and system sounds, galleries of Star Wars art, including behind-the-scenes photos and storyboards, as well as trailers, book excerpts and a digital version of the 1977 first issue of Marvel Comics' "Star Wars" adaptation.

Sure, I'd love to see a higher-end Star Wars laptop, constructed from premium materials and with better graphics options. But even on this very mainstream system, the Star Wars design elements, red backlit keyboard, and even the custom packing materials all make it look and feel like a more premium machine than it is. If you want to spend $700 or so on a midsize, midrange 15-inch laptop, there are many ways to do so. And if you're a Star Wars fan who isn't afraid to rock a Darth Vader laptop in public, this is a fun way to spend about the same and get something fun and unique.

Design and features

This is certainly one of the most distinctive-looking laptops we've seen, as nearly every visible surface is covered with Star Wars graphics. Over the past decade, I've only seen a handful of PCs with this sort of branding, mostly limited to few performance laptops with Porsche or Ferrari logos.

In this case, the look is distinctive, but also subtle, with a black-on-gray design with red highlights. Rather than a big, bright Star Wars logo, you instead get muted monochromatic images of Darth Vader (on the back of the lid) and a Stormtrooper (on the keyboard tray), set against what HP calls a battle-worn design, with scratchy renditions of the Death Star and Imperial logos in the background. A line of Aurebesh writing sits along the hinge, spelling out "Galactic Empire" in the language of the Star Wars films.

The backlit keyboard is a deep Empire-like red, and the light shines through translucent letter shapes on each key. The touchpad is one of my favorite design elements. Its plastic surface is imprinted with an X-Wing's targeting computer view of the Death Star trench, which may be the only non-Empire touch on this otherwise Dark-Side-dominated laptop.

Besides the fancy paint job, the system comes with a sizable collection of preinstalled Star Wars digital content. Most is found in the Star Wars Command Center app, which gives you access to background image collections and photo galleries, as well as several collections of system sounds.

Most of the background collections have between 12 and 35 images, and they include ones built around movie locations such as Tatooine and Endor, characters like Darth Vader or behind-the-scenes images of storyboards and ship models. You can select which images from a particular collection to use, and set them to automatically rotate on a timer, which is set to 30 seconds by default.

The galleries include a lot of cool-looking concept and production art, film stills, posters and more. Click on one, and they simply open up in the Windows Photo Viewer app, where you can flip through them. I have no doubt all the images here can be found elsewhere online, but a few of the galleries are fun to dive into, especially the collection of foreign-language theatrical posters.

The 15.6-inch display has a native resolution of 1,920x1,080 pixels. Standard Pavilion laptops start with a 1,366x768 display, but in the Star Wars version, 1080p is the default, with a touch display as part of a set of upgrades you can get for $999. The screen has a matte finish, which may make your videos pop a little less, but we generally prefer it to an overly glossy, reflective display. For a midprice laptop, it has surprisingly good off-axis viewing angles.

Connections and performance

As a full-size 15-inch laptop, you get a generous collection of ports and connections, the same as you'd find on a standard 15-inch HP Pavilion, including an Ethernet jack, SD card slot, three USB ports and even a DVD drive.

The basic $699 configuration includes a 2.3GHz Intel Core i5-6200U low-voltage processor (part of Intel's current sixth-generation of Core i-series chips), along with 6GB of RAM and a large 1TB hard drive. For $749, you can bump the RAM to 8GB and add a basic Nvidia GeForce 940M graphics card, which is OK for very basic gaming, but doesn't make this a gaming machine. A high-end configuration gives you a small processor bump (to a Core i5-6500U) and adds a touch display, for $999.

In benchmark testing, our $699 configuration performed admirably for a midprice Core i5 laptop. A recent Dell Inspiron 15 with a faster Core i5-6300HQ (a quad-core CPU, versus the dual-core one in the HP) performed better, while Microsoft's Atom-powered Surface 3, which would cost around $620 if you included the keyboard cover, was much slower.

The configuration reviewed here has only Intel's built-in basic graphics capabilities, while the upgraded models include a separate video card from Nvidia. But, that entry level GeForce 940M card isn't what mainstream gamers will want if they wish to play new games at 1,920x1,080 resolution and medium-to-high detail settings (look for a laptop with an Nvidia 960M GPU instead).

Aside from a lack of gamer-level graphics, the Force is also not strong with this laptop's battery life. Running for just 5 hours, 58 minutes on our offline video playback test and 4 hours, 46 minutes in our online streaming video test, it's near the bottom of the barrel for current mainstream laptops, where hitting 6 hours is the absolute minimum one should expect.

Conclusion

HP has taken a standard-issue 15-inch Pavilion laptop, one of the most middle-of-the-road, midprice laptops you can find, and dressed it up with some very nice Star Wars graphics and digital content. Since there's little or no price premium between this and the standard 15-inch Pavilion (depending on the exact configuration and periodic sales), it's a fun collection of extras for Star Wars aficionados that doesn't demand a "fan tax."

A truly premium Star Wars laptop, with a slim, metal body and higher-end components, would be a real collectors item, but aside from that, the HP Star Wars Special Edition Notebook was both fun to use and functional, and reminded me that sometimes a $699 laptop is all you need for everyday computing.