HP Pavilion Aero 13 (BE-2026AU) Laptop Review – Lightness to the Next Level

The HP Pavilion Aero 13 Laptop is the continuous tradition of the Pavilion lineups that mostly focuses on a improved generations when comes to multitasking that mixed with great multimedia capability, of course it is also a work capable laptop.

Today we will quickly look at the 2023 HP Pavilion Aero 13, one of the touted AMD based lightweight laptop that is easy to look at bring along.

Design & Build

The body of the Pavilion Aero 13 is made out of magnesium alloy mixed with some plastic material to it. Most of the parts are recyclable friendly as well. Weighted at around 900 grams, this also makes the laptop one of the lightest you can find for the upper mid range performance specs laptop that also slim with packed in slim bezels over the screen area. Despite all of these, holding it is damn solid to the hands yet smooth towards the touch, with colors that matches both the overall body and the keyboard/touchpad areas, yet if you are trying to flex the body of the laptop, it hardly budges and this shows some quality in it which is kind of tough but elegantly designed with nice rounded curve on all sides.

Despite the small footprint, the Pavilion Aero 13 still houses a good number of ports available, a power plug, USB C port, 2 USB A ports and a HDMI Port, this will benefit in terms of the accessibility and convenience. Keyboard is comfortable to type as well with minimal wobble and flex to it, the spacing on each keys is not too far and this makes it easy to reach and type on to the the next character with ease. The touchpad is fairly wide and it is Windows Precision Drivers certified with Windows 11 and last but not least, a dedicated fingerprint scanner with Windows Hello authentication support. There is also a webcam included on top of the display, enabling 720P resolution images, definitely not the highest resolution but it does the job as long you are using it in a well lit area.

Display & Audio

The HP Pavilion Aero 13 matte display is backed by a 16:10 micro-edge aspect ratio, 13 inch 1920 x 1200 resolution that is highly suitable especially for productivity purposes, hence giving you more place to work with within the screen, especially those spreadsheet and documents. The brightness can peaked up to 400nits while colors displayed in full 100% SRGB, making it a great candidate over some photo and video editing. During our testing and experience, we find it quite comfortable to watch a few video streaming thanks to the DC dimming that dynamically adjust brightness depending on the overall environment. Though it is not an OLED display, but one can still enjoy the visuals that it has to offer with accuracy and vibrance.

Towards the sound, the HP Pavilion Aero 13 is has a pair of speakers located below the keyboard, along with it is the optimization provided both by B&O and HP Audio, taking immersive experience with the dedicated control app, allowing equalizer settings for the users. Experience wise, it can get real loud although it looks small in size, with good treble balance towards certain music tunes. So to speak, the audio experience is satisfying and also there is built in array microphone so that you can communicate clearly with your favorite communications and video calls via the webcam.

Performance, Software, Benchmarks

The HP Pavilion Aero 13 came with the latest AMD Ryzen 5 7535U with integrated Radeon 680M GPU, 16GB of soldered DDR5 RAM and 500GB NVME SSD. Since this is an AMD laptop, expect good performance in multitasking on 6 cores and 12 threads, while the amount of RAM allows you to switch applications, visual editing quickly. Windows 11 Home Single Language is included along with a few HP specific apps. You still be able to find a few bloatwares, but that’s pretty much about it and not too intrusive, if you dont like it, just uninstall it.

There is two specific HP related software that is installed, OMEN Gaming Hub and myHP App, both of which allows you to check your system information, monitor temps, system performance, check for warranty as well is displaying games discount and other HP related promotions. AMD Radeon software will also play a role in enhancing your settings and providing driver updates, tweaks for your GPU and Processor, along with the latest drivers, FSR and FreeSync is supported since this laptop has part of the RDNA architecture in it.

So how this laptop performs?. Well because this is an almost a full AMD based laptop, you basically can do most of the editing tasks fairly easy, multimedia content is no sweat for this laptop which work wise, doing non intensive office stuff will at least get you around 7 hours average and recharging it will just take around an average of two hours to full with the included 45W charger, alternatively you can use a 45W USB C charger or above to charge it as well, providing convenience just by carrying USB C charger with other compatible USB C devices. If you wish to game on it, the good news is you can with games such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider at low settings or Genshin Impact with a mix of medium settings.

We will provide the benchmarks also, roughly the performance is around some of the mid tier ultraportable laptop that is capable of some content creations.

Technical Specifications

Verdict & Conclusion

The HP Pavilion Aero 13 proves to be one of the AMD based ecosystem laptop that is lightweight, work ready, with good multimedia features baked into it, along with some light gaming thanks to the inclusion of the Radeon APU takes up a notch in laptops can be small yet powerful for most consumers needs. To add, with a starting price of RM3699 for the Ryzen 5 model, it is something that is worth considering if you are solely wanted one laptop that does most of your daily task and entertainment that fits literary in your bag and carry it along with 2 years of warranty.

For more information on the laptop, CLICK Here to find out.

Special thanks to HP and AMD on providing this laptop for a review.