Hands-on: HP EliteBook Revolve 810 a sturdy little laptop/tablet swivel hybrid

Hey. I'm Scott Stein. And when it comes to buying a laptop at this point, you might wanna wonder, can it turn into a tablet? Well, also, are there laptops that you wanna look at that aren't necessarily in the area of consumer laptops that might be worth buying? Sometimes, there are gems out there that are business-targeted laptops. The HP Elitebook Revolve 810 was one of those ones I saw back at CES. And you thought, maybe this could be a contender because that's an 11.6-inch laptop that also happens to convert into a tablet. Has a swivel screen, flips around like this, boom. Pop down. And it's a tablet. And it's not really a tablet in the sense of like a thin tablet that you might be used to. This is 0.8 inches thick, it's 3 pounds. It's okay in one hand, but this is really a laptop. And it's gonna serve an old-fashioned swivel screen design that existed before Windows 8. But now, this has been reinvented in a multi-touch capacitive design. It's a lot like the ThinkPad Twist which debuted last year from Lenovo. But each piece iteration is really nice. It's got a magnesium chassis, it's got a backlit keyboard, it's very comfortable. This excels in the details. it's got a really nice trackpad here, it's small, but it's clickable and comfortable, and the screen looks really crisp-- although it's only 1366x768. So, what's the drawback? Well, one, the price. It's starts at $1,249. And this goes up to $1,400-ish for this configuration with the Core i5 processor. And that brings up the second drawback, which is battery life. Because this doesn't run the latest Haswell level Core i-series processors. This is yet to upgrade to that. So, the battery life was okay. It's just not as great, certainly, as the levels that we've been starting to see in things like the MacBook Air and you're hitting a whole new level of expectation. And maybe this, with those next gen processors, you could be on to something. But you're also getting some features and specs that are really meant for Pro users, vPro, you've got DisplayPort in the back as opposed to HDMI. So, you know, if you'd care for a sim card slot, you wanna have a broadband-capable laptop, this might be for you. But the sturdy semi-rugged design here, it's got a splash-resistant keyboard, and is designed to take a little bit of a beating, some people might go for that. But I think this is really like if it's available in your IT department, and you might wanna upgrade to this. It's a nice laptop, but you're gonna regret that the battery isn't just a little bit better. If I saw this back in January, I would have really loved it. But mid-summer? Kinda feels like it needs a bit of an upgrade already. I'm Scott Stein, and that's a look at the HP Elitebook Revolve 810.