Our current HP AIO is getting old and we decided to try out the new HP Envy Move AIO to see how it would be as a replacement.
Unboxing and Setup
The Move comes in a plain heavy cardboard box and is very well protected sitting inside a pressed paper frame. It’s also covered by a thick paper type cover helping protect it during shipping. Inside with it is the keyboard “with built in trackpad”, power adapter, power cord and some paperwork.
At first glance I was wondering how the “attached legs” worked as I could not turn them and there were little black pegs sticking out the bottom of them. So after picking up the device with the heavy duty rubber handle/strap and starting to set on the table the legs automatically rotate forward, no need to touch them, “pretty cool”. If you pick the device up off the table, the legs automatically rotate in turning them out of the way for transportation.
Now looking around the Move, on the right side, is the power button toward the top, a rocker switch for screen brightness, a button to pick screen inputs, a HDMI port and a power port. On the left side is another rocker button for volume, a USB C port and a full-sized USB A Port. There’s nothing on the back except for a cloth stretchy pocket you can put the keyboard in, and on top is a slider for webcam privacy and some vents for intake and exhaust. The front has a cloth strip covering the speakers and at top of the screen there’s the webcam and Windows Hello IR emitter.
The included keyboard is a chicklet style keyboard and pretty easy to type on, and if you are used to the keys on a laptop, you won’t have any problem typing on it. There is a very large trackpad to the right where a keypad would normally be and is very sensitive to the touch, pressing down for a mouse click gives a very audible tactile click.
The Move itself is very lightweight, and even though the screen size is the same as the HP AIO we already have it’s physically smaller, thinner and lighter. The color scheme is an off white with little black specs in it “almost like pepper” and looks pretty good, the finish is also matte and there’s no gloss to it at all.
Setting up is pretty straightforward, just plug in and turn on following the onscreen instructions. The included keyboard does come with batteries you need to install but it would not work during initial setup and I had to use the on screen keyboard which was pretty easy. After going through all the Windows setup, the keyboard was finally recognized and worked fine afterwards.
Using:
The system has an I5 processor and 8gb of memory and I wasn’t expecting a speed demon, but for everyday tasks, “browsing the web, word processing, streaming media, ect.” It’s plenty fast. It also works great for basic gaming and any of the MS games like Candy Crush, Solitaire, Mahjong all work flawlessly and never stuttered. I wasn’t going to try any newer high end gaming titles but wondered if it would handle an older game so I installed Fallout 4. At native resolution and all graphics set to “low” I was only getting 29-46fps, but setting the graphics to 1280*720, “graphics still on low” it managed 58-72fps, and the game was actually playable and looked pretty good. Next I decided to try Witcher 3 “not expecting much” and with the graphics set to “low” at 1280*720 it managed 32-46fps. The image doesn’t look great but it’s playable. Now I didn’t use the trackpad for playing, I did end up using a Logi Bluetooth mouse to play those. I was impressed that the system never became hot or the fans got very loud, I never really could hear them while playing the games, and any heat comes out the right top vent, the left is the intake.
I did some benchmarks with Geekbench 5 and the new i5 processor stood up pretty well. Now I’m comparing it to a newer Alienware m15 with a gen 13 i7 processor and dedicated GPU but against the Intel UHD 700 graphics it actually wins by a good bit “see the picture included in the review”, so there are no complaints there performance wise.
The screen itself looks great, I we were both surprised just how well movies looked on it as the blacks are very black with no bleeding, and everything played smoothly, we both agreed it had as good of an image as our dedicated TLC 4k tv even though this is a 2k screen, and 4k wouldn’t really be needed on a 24” screen.
Sound is very good coming from the Bang and Olufsen speakers and got plenty loud for our viewing. It would be easy to add a Bluetooth speaker or Bluetooth headphones for privacy or if you need more volume than what the built in provides.
The built in webcam works good, it has a better image than our old AIO and it has the built in IR light for using the Windows “Hello” face login. This feature works really well and the system recognizes anyone that has an account set up and logs them into that account every time, we had no issues with that at all.
This system also has a built-in battery so you can unplug and take it into another room to use very easily. I tried out the battery and easily got 3 hours of streaming off Netflix or Max. The cordless part is a neat feature I’ve never seen before in a AIO, It’s like having a 24” Windows tablet “tried that and it works”. And if you are streaming a movie it’s easy to take around the house plop down where you want it.
As for upgradeability, you really shouldn’t try, but I did open up ours and found there’s only one SSD connector, and the memory is soldered to the mother board and no expansion slots available. The only other item you could change is the WiFi card, and that’s it. You could replace the SSD if needed or want a larger drive than the 512k that’s included but for most people that will be more than enough.
Conclusion:
This is really a different device, sort of a mix between a very large tablet and an AIO, it works and works very good in most cases. We did, and still do, have some issues with the keyboard stops working after waking up the system, “the trackpad still works though”, turning off/on the power resolves this and hopefully a driver fix will take care of this issue. The rotating legs work well and are made of metal, they aren’t flimsy and once in place the device does feel very sturdy, but they do not work well or at all on a softer surface “not that you should be setting on a bed anyway” but those pegs that turn the legs do need a firm surface to sit on for them to work correctly. I should also note that the legs do allow a little bit of tilt to them too, “which surprised us” and just enough if you happen to be sitting higher than the screen or want to tilt away some glare from the glossy screen.
There are a lot of features with this system too, it will tell you if you are sitting too close to the screen and you can configure that as a popup or it can blur the screen till you move further away. The distance it gives the warning can be adjusted easily within the app or just turned off. There’s also a auto audio level that will increase the volume as you get further away so no need of going back to turn up the volume.
There aren’t many ports, just two USB ports, a C and a full sided A, and I would have liked to see one USB on each side. The HDMI port on the right works as an input so you can hook up a DVD player and use the screen as a monitor. There’s also no SD card slot so you’ll have to use a reader if you want to transfer any files from say a camera or video device. You’ll also have to remember that this system really isn’t upgradeable, “SSD yes”, but getting it open is not exactly easy.
So if you are looking for a web browsing, media consumption AIO and want to do some word processing and light office work, “can even throw in some light gaming” this new HP Envy Move is going to be a great AIO for you.