Digital Home Thoughts: Voodoo Releases the Envy: Possibly the World's Thinnest Notebook?

Although it might not look like it from the photo above, the Voodoo Envy is 0.7 inches thin all the way through the chassis - the Macbook Air is 0.76 inches thin but tapers down to 0.16 inches thin at the edges. I'll leave it to someone else to do the math and figure out if the Air is still the world's thinnest notebook, but there's no denying that Voodoo and HP have pull off something amazing here - especially when you consider that the Voodoo Envy has a removable battery, two USB ports (one is a hybrid USB/ESATA port), and an HDMI port. The carbon fibre chassis allowed them to do the impressive feat of having a removable battery in a design that thin. Like the Air, it has a large touchpad that supports multiple finger tracking and pinching/momentum gestures. The Envy also has a back-lit keyboard with a proximity sensor - the back-lit keyboard will turn off if you take one hand off the keyboard to use the trackpad, but will turn on when your hands return to the typing position. Slick.

Rated for up to 3 hours 45 minutes of battery life, the Envy gives up a little battery life to the Air, although I've heard that the 5 hour battery estimate from Apple is nowhere near reality. Here's one of the slickest things about the Envy though: the Ethernet port is built into the power brick, and when you connect an Ethernet cable and it confirms it has an IP address, the Voodoo logo will light up on the power brick. The Envy then connects wirelessly to the power brick - how cool is that? After the break check out the video from Notebooks.com.