The HP 6730s is coated in a plain matte black finish with a black gloss trim around the screen and keyboard. With this being a business notebook, we weren't expecting the usual shiny and love it or hate it designs that plague consumer notebooks. But it would have been nice to see HP change things a bit and add a touch of gunmetal grey to offset the dull black which would make it a little more interesting to look at and admire.

One thing that HP does well is with its notebook keyboards and the 6730s is no exception. The keyboard is responsive but touch typists used to having concave keys will have to get used to the flat keys on the 6730s. Unfortunately the touchpad is too small as we found that we would constantly run into the edges of the depressed touchpad during usage. The mouse buttons also felt cheap and tipped forward when pressed which makes the buttons feel as if they are broken.

There's a solitary shortcut key that controls the wireless LAN and Bluetooth and is located next to the power button. There’s only one indicator light which indicates hard drive activity and is located right on the edge of the notebook which makes it hard to see, rendering it basically unusable.

By way of connectivity there’s wireless 802.11n support, Express Card/54 slot, VGA out and four USB ports. Unlike some other notebooks available, the 6730 does not have its own docking port, so finding a non-HP port replicator is required if you need additional ports.

Storage comes in the form of a 160GB 5400RPM SATA hard drive which gets cut down to roughly 137GB of usable storage when you first power up the notebook in Windows XP. The hard drive is also protected by HP’s 3D DriveGuard technology that protects the drive from shock to ensure that no data is lost.

The glossy 15.4-inch screen supports a resolution of 1280x800 and is the quality that you’d expect to see from HP with both text and images being displayed cleanly.