HP’s new business notebooks sport up to 32 hours battery life

Computing giant Hewlett-Packard is the top computer maker on the planet, and today the company unveiled a veritable legion of new notebooks aimed at business users, featuring sleek, toughened industrial designs, environmentally-friendly components and manufacturing, and solid performance. And, not daunted by the ThinkPad unveiled yesterday that can run up to 30 hours on battery power, HP is touting the new HP EliteBook 8460p with up to 32 hours of battery life.

“HP is the market leader in business notebooks and we have raised the bar with a completely revamped line of business-grade notebooks,” said HP’s VP for business notebooks, in a statement.

First up, the HP EliteBook 8460p and EliteBook 8560p sport 14- and 15.6-inch screens, respectively, and will be available with a range of Intel’s latest Sandy Bridge second-generation Core processors, from Core i3 all the way up through Core i7s. The systems are built around HP’s new “Forge” design, with precision engineering, aluminum-alloy hinges and cast titanium alloy latches for durability—HP boasts the system meet military standards for ruggedness. Users will be able to choose between Sandy Bridge integrated graphics or AMD Radeon HD 6470M discrete graphic with 1 GB of video memory, either traditional hard drives or SSD drive options, Blu-ray or standard DVD drives, and the notebooks sport integrated USB 3.0 ports alongside a USB 2.0 charging port. The systems also support up to 16 GB of RAM. However, perhaps the signature feature of the notebooks will be battery life: the systems will be available with 3-, 6-, and 9-cell batteries along options for HP’s Extended Life Notebook Battery and HP Ultra-Capacity Notebook Battery: with the latter, HP says the EliteBook 8460p can run up to 32 hours on a single charge. Expect to see the new EliteBooks in mid-March with prices starting at $999 and $1,099, respectively, although that’ll scale up quickly as users add options.

More conservatively, the new HP ProBook 6360b, 6460b, and 6560b are aimed to be flexible business notebooks available in a wide range of configurations. The lineup is notable for the 6360b, which scaled down to a 13.3-inch screen for improved portability, but is still available with a full range of processors, support for up to 16 GB of RAM, and an internal optical drive. The systems sport a re-enforced ABS chassis, a DisplaySafe frame to protect the screen, and have a drain on the bottom of the case that helps protect components against minor spills into the keyboard. The 6460b scales up to a 14-inch screen while the 6560b offers a 15.6-inch display—they should all start landing at retailers in mid-March for prices starting at $799.

Finally, HP has updated its ProBook s-series with four new models, offering a wide range of sizes and configuration options, as well as HP’s QuickWeb technology that lets people get on the Internet without waiting for WIndows to boot—and HP has expanded QuickWeb to include offline email capability, Skype video conferencing, and widgets to keep track of social media weather. (Or maybe that’s weather and social media separately.) The ProBook s-series will also be available with the latest Intel Core processors from Core i3s to I7s, and will feature Intel integrated graphics, support for up to 8 GB of RAM, and both USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports. Prices should start at $579, and the systems should be available next month.