Admit it: You've said to your boss that you need an ultraportable laptop because it would give you easy and instant access to your work data. But the truth is, the main reason anyone buys a sleek, slim ultraportable is to turn heads. The HP Voodoo Envy 133 is one such shiny new toy, with just enough features to legitimize it as a slick business box as well. Like the Apple MacBook Air, the Envy 133 sports enough interesting design choices for it to be a genuine attention-getter. Unfortunately, however, it also shares the Air's anemic guts and high price tag.

Whereas Apple's thin-and-light is slightly curvy and well-rounded, the Envy 133 is boxy -- yet with its glossy sheen, it's still sexy. This Voodoo laptop measures 12.7 by 9 by 0.8 inches (closely matching the Air), and it weighs 3.5 pounds without its incredibly unique power brick, which I'll go into more detail about soon.

What I need to address first, though, are the system's less-than-speedy components.

For starters, the NV4040NA model we tested (a configuration that HP says is suitable for the road warrior) comes equipped with an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.6-GHz CPU (SP7500), 2GB of RAM, and a poky 80GB hard drive that spins at 4200 rpm. You probably won't be shocked to learn that the system didn't exactly sail through WorldBench 6. It received an overall score of 64, and it ran single-digit slide shows in Doom 3 (7 frames per second at 1024-by-768-pixel resolution). Nobody will mistake this Voodoo box for a game machine.

And while the Envy 133 doesn't have the worst battery life, its results in our tests were far from the best: Lasting 2 hours, 39 minutes, it ran a little longer than the MacBook Air but fell way behind almost everything else we've seen. (By comparison, the Lenovo ThinkPad X200 rules the roost, having lasted a staggering 8 hours, 54 minutes. And the sexy Samsung X360 hung on for 7 hours, 36 minutes.) On average, laptops we test can run approximately 4.5 hours.

Innovative Design Choices

So, with those performance knocks against the HP Voodoo Envy 133, why would anyone in their right mind consider dropping roughly $2349 for it? Let's take a look at some aspects of its design.

This ultraportable incorporates a number of genuinely unique ideas -- stuff that I'd never seen before -- and I applaud a few of them. The slim, sealed case doesn't allow much room, so don't try looking for a lot of inputs. The Envy 133 has one headphone jack and one USB port, and it makes a couple of nods to the high end with an HDMI-out and a shared eSATA/USB port. One interesting choice: The slot-loading external optical drive that sells with this unit plugs in with an eSATA cable.

No ethernet port on this machine? No worries. In a first-of-its-kind move,

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