Product Listing

HP ProBook 4411s - Budget Business Class

By Aloysius Low - 15 Aug 2009

E for Exterior

E for Exterior

As mentioned earlier, because the ProBook 4411s is a more affordable range from HP, it sports a less sturdy build made of plastic as opposed to the magnesium chassis of the EliteBook range. Despite that, the notebook feels reassuringly solid in our usage and we felt comforted by its thick chunky solid presence. If it's a slim and light notebook you're looking for, well this isn't it, but if you're like us, you will appreciate the build for its dependable brick-like presence.

Apart from its build, there's also the glorious merlot color scheme that does its best to catch your attention. Business notebooks tend to be a drab formal affair, so it's always nice to see a little touch of flair in the choice of color for the ProBook 4411s. Opening up the notebook, you'll find that the color scheme extends downwards to the speakers and palm rest, but the area around the chiclet keyboard comes clad in gloss black. More gloss awaits you around the bezel of the screen, though the matte screen escapes the same treatment.

We love matte screens here at HardwareZone, and the ProBook goes straight to our hearts with its matte screen finish.

Just above the keyboard area, you'll find a large power button and located next to it, the QuickLook2 button that boots the system into HP's QuickLook 2 shell. QuickLook 2 gives you speedy access to view your calendars, emails, appointments without booting into Windows. It currently works with Microsoft Outlook and is basically a cached version of your actual data. Note however that you can't create or reply emails as the QuickLook 2 environment is purely for a quick check on your schedule.

Activating the QuickLook 2 function is a simple affair - just hit the small button located next to the power button.

The very basic looking but functional HP QuickLook 2.

The chiclet keyboard was easy to type on, though we could detect very noticeable flex on the keyboard itself. The keys are also lacking in HP's Durakeys technology, but we don't expect that to be an issue for most casual users. We do however love the feel and responsiveness of the trackpad. The buttons of the trackpad felt a bit strange with their odd tilting angle; it made clicking the buttons slightly difficult. You may find it different, but we didn't quite like our experience with the trackpad.

The chiclet keyboad was nice to type on save for the very noticeable flex while we typed.

The trackpad buttons' odd angle when depressed made us miss the normal trackpad buttons found on other notebooks.

Lastly, audio quality sounded decent enough for presentations in a closed environment, but don't expect anything more. The HP ProBook 4411s isn't an entertainment class notebook anyway, so don't get any wrong ideas about the machine's proposition.

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