Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I just wanted to give people some quick impressions of the new HP Pavilion x360 13-S128NR. Mine arrived today, so these are some very early thoughts on it. First, the build quality seems impressive. At first glance it looks like a more expensive machine and it isn't until you touch it that you realize the body is plastic and not aluminum. Also, I immediately noticed on the bottom a "Pro Windows" sticker (see update below!). This was surprising to find. It's not mentioned what version this would come with but I had assumed it'd be Windows 10 Home. Pro gives you some additional features, especially nice if you are going to use this for business. The keyboard and trackpad are nice enough. I'm not too picky about keyboards/trackpads so I can't say too much. They work fine for me. The screen is great. Very sharp and bright. I will have to take it outside for a real test of the brightness. Using it as a touch screen, it is very responsive. 16:9 isn't my favorite ratio for screens but I knew that going in so just consider this if you're comparing it to an iPad or Surface if you intend to use as a tablet. Also, consider the weight. This is more than 2x the weight of the Surface Pro 4. Again, something I considered when I bought it. It's comfortable enough to use on the couch though. You have about 85GB left of the 128GB SSD when you boot the machine up. Surprisingly, there isn't a ton of junkware on this. It's still not a "signature PC", but the pre-installed software was easy enough to remove. Clearing that up only gave me a little bit of space left. Battery life I'll have to leave for later. Obviously I have just received it and need time to evaluate this. Battery update 11/2/15: Charged the machine up yesterday and used it for 4-5 hours constantly for web browsing, youtube and installing software. Windows was reporting 4.5-5 hrs left after this. Not bad at all. Will look into it more though. Other than, it's a nice snappy laptop for the price and I look forward to using it more. FYI: I did experience one bug, though this seems related to Windows 10 itself, and not HP itself as I found the solution from a user of a different brand. The screen refused to rotate no matter the orientation and the screen lock options were greyed out. Hmm. Windows Update had a few items, but that didn't resolve it. I found the solution on a forum: Hold the PC in portrait mode, and then the option to unlock the screen rotation become available. Presto! Update 1: Unfortunately, my screen had a dead pixel near the middle, plus I was experiencing some graphical corruption that made things look like bad analog TV reception. Amazon quickly shipped me a replacement (overnight!) and I am in the process of returning the defective one. I am still not sure about battery life. The screen seems to eat a lot at 100% brightness which is to be expected I guess. I could see 6 hours being easily achievable but I am unsure exactly how much further it might go. 11.5 does see to be a stretch. What makes it harder to determine is the battery estimate is all over the place. One minute it might say 3.5 hours, next 6 hours. Sometimes it'll say 5.5 hours and an hour later it says 5.5 hours. Maybe it takes time to calibrate the estimate. Update 2: Jury is STILL out on the battery life. I can't seem to tell if it's my use that drains it or not. I don't feel like I'm using it more than any other day. I will say it's more consistent. 5.5 hours at least. Right now I've been using it for 20 minutes after a full charge. Windows still shows 100% and 7hrs 7 mins of time left. On another note, I have had a nagging bug for a while. The graphics driver would crash constantly in some situations, mainly using Microsoft Edge or other browsers. There is not a driver update from Windows Update or HP. If you go to Intel's website, there is a beta driver that takes care of it! You need to go to device manager first and uninstall the built in driver (windows installs a generic of course so don't worry). Make sure to select the checkbox to delete it as well. Once you do that and reboot you can install the driver from the Intel site. Update 3 (1/4/16): Windows Pro or Home?: Buyers are reporting this does not come in with Windows Pro. The two I ordered certainly did (see photo). But all the documentation says it should be home, so purchase it assuming it comes with home. Battery life: I'm at a loss at how they could claim 11.5 hours of battery life. Perhaps if you turn off Wifi? I don't know. A computer without internet is kind of useless these days. Maybe if you're just doing some writing/photo editing. But then again, I like to look up things while writing and look up techniques while photo editing. I say 6 hours is what to expect, on average. I've tried editing my power plan by reducing TDP (7.5w), CPU max speed (50%) and using maximum batter settings for graphics and wireless. I'd say I got a negligible bump by doing this (30 min - 1hr). None of this is scientific of course. Does anyone have a suggestion? I'd love to hear it. I'd love to hear what HP says as well if there is a rep who can comment. My wife's copy is the same.