HP 15s-fq2016sa Review

The HP 15s-fq2016sa is a budget-friendly mid-range laptop that offers significant savings over the competition, making it a perfect choice for students and office employees.

Our review unit, the HP 15s-fq2016sa is a smaller model of the 17-inch HP 17-cn0025nr, both equipped with an Intel Core i5-1135G7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB solid-state drive, and an Intel Iris Xe graphics card.

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For the most part, it makes excellent use of current components, achieving results comparable to the top end of Intel’s 11th generation mobile processors, which is genuinely commendable. Moreover, all of this is packed inside a sleek and appealing case that is slim enough to appear more expensive and equipped with sufficient ports to be completely functional.

However, HP rarely performs miracles considering the price and despite its capabilities. While certain corners have been cut, they have been carefully chosen and are likely to be features you can live without — such as the absence of a fingerprint reader and an unlit keyboard.

HP 15s-fq2016sa Specs

Here is the HP 15s-fq2016sa configuration in this review:

Design and Features

The first thing you’ll notice about the HP 15 laptop is that it does not appear like a typical mid-range professional laptop. Instead, with its sharp lines and stylish silver appearance, you might be mistaken for thinking this is a gaming laptop without the RGB flair.

It features an attractive, modest design with a sleek, modern bezel that accommodates a 720p webcam for all your video conferencing needs. Its construction is robust, with bonded hinges that prevent the gadget from wobbling during presentations.

Weighing 3.75 kilograms and measuring only 0.71 inches thick, the HP 15s-fq2016sa is small and portable, making it easy to sling in a backpack and take around on a university campus.

HP has chosen a 15.6-inch, Full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) display for this laptop; however, unlike the HP Pavilion x360 (14-dh2011nr), the HP 15 is not a convertible, and folding back the hinge will cause damage.

Even though the 15s-fq2016sa is a relatively small piece of equipment, HP has not skimped on port allocation. The laptop features two high-speed USB-A ports, a USB-C port, HDMI out, a headphone jack, and a microSD card slot, ensuring a high level of interoperability. It’s nice to see some older connections reintroduced into a market where USB-A and HDMI are being dropped altogether. In addition, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 provide wireless communication.

Touchpad & Keyboard

The keyboard is pleasantly tactile, smooth, and sensitive, which puts it light years ahead of some of the most compact laptops available. However, it is not backlit, so it is not one of the finest selections for working when the light fades.

The touchpad is nearly the same size as what you have on the MacBook, providing enough mobility for your fingers. It’s delightfully smooth and accurate in its tracking, plus it has some reasonably strong and sensitive buttons. Unfortunately, it lacks a fingerprint reader for Windows Hello logins, but it’s still an excellent combination.

HP 15s-fq2016sa performance

The HP 15-inch laptop features an Intel Core i5-1135G7 11th generation processor, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD), and Intel Iris Xe graphics. This configuration is essentially identical to that of the Asus ZenBook 14 (UX425EA-EH51), except that the latter features double the storage – 256GB SSD – and a Thunderbolt 4, which is not available on the HP 15 laptop.

As a result of the 11th Gen processor and fast SSD boot drive, this laptop performs better than most competitors at this price point, even outperforming certain premium and expensive Windows Ultrabooks. This kind of performance highlights the incremental advantages that a “Tiger Lake” processor may deliver, as well as the benefits of a sufficient amount of RAM.

Even with a dozen Chrome tabs open, the 15s-fq2016sa performs admirably throughout browsing, and it is undoubtedly capable of breezing through any schoolwork or pressing office deadlines.

There’s also the option of light gaming — though don’t expect to get too carried away. You can run some less demanding titles, such as Minecraft, but loading a mega GTA V may be a bit much. If you need to push yourself to the limit on a budget, consider the Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 (82K20015US model), which comes equipped with a dedicated Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card.

Battery life

The 15s-fq2016sa is a laptop that easily punches above its weight in terms of performance. Regrettably, the same cannot be said for the device’s battery life. With the brightness reduced to 50% and the PCMark 10 benchmark used to simulate office work, the HP 15-inch laptop lasts approximately seven and a half hours, nearly an hour shorter than HP claims.

The HP 15s-fq2016sa performs poorly compared to the competition — the Asus ZenBook 14 lasts well over 12 hours, and our favorite Windows machine, the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3, lasts 8 hours 45 minutes.

Bottom Line

The HP 15-inch laptop is a well-built and attractive mid-range notebook with a tactile keyboard and a good array of ports. Additionally, it offers well-balanced audio and Ultrabook-level performance at a lower price than the majority of the competitors.

With its slightly dark display, the HP 15s-fq2016sa, on the other hand, doesn’t perform entirely as well as the HP Pavilion 15 (15-eg0021nr) or the Asus ZenBook 14 (UX425EA-EH51) in everyday use – even though they are only a few hundred dollars more expensive.

That said, for individuals looking to add some flair to their office setup or require enough power to work throughout the day at the office or college, the HP 15s-fq2016sa is a reasonably priced alternative.