The HP EliteBook Folio 1020 is the newest machine to grace the showground and it goes straight for the Apple MacBook Air, inviting it for a head to head specs showdown. HP claims that their newly-unveiled notebook is better than the entry-level MacBook Air in so many ways and that it may be Apple's newest and biggest rival in this category to date. But is this claim accurate or far-fetched?

The HP EliteBook Folio 1020 looks thinner than the MacBook Air and it is indeed. As per eWEEK, Hewlett Packard already claimed the title as the maker of the "world's thinnest and lightest" notebook in the business sector of the market. Their lightweight aspect is where the battle gets stiffer. The MacBook Air weighs 2.96 pounds at the most, 2.26 at the least. The HP EliteBook is at 2.2 pounds. The design, as eWEEK pointed out, are almost interchangeable.

Their screen size area, on the other hand, is very interesting. The MacBook Air comes in two variants, one that sports an 11.6-inch screen and another that features a 13.3-inch display. The former renders a 1366 x 768 screen resolution while the latter delivers 1440 x 900. On the other hand, the size of the EliteBook Folio is somewhere in between, with its 12.5-inch Full HD display that equates to a 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution. With touch on the screen, it goes in Quad HD, generating a 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution. In this department (still with the absence of test and benchmarking), the HP knocks out the Apple machine early and it seems that it will continue to put the boot in it with their anatomy.

The EliteBook Folio is packed with the Intel Core-M processor complemented with Intel HD Graphics 5300 chip. It also houses 8 GB of memory and a storage capacity up to 256 GB. Its Apple rival has an Intel Core i5 and Intel HD Graphics 5000 GPU under its hood. It comes with the same storage capacity but only half the Elitebook's memory. Good thing though is that it can be configured to 8 GB.

In putting all these features to use, battery life is a major key player. Unfortunately, this is where the EliteBook Folio falls short. Users can work on the HP laptop for nine hours. The MacBook Air can last three hours longer than that so that is half a day of use on the Apple device.

Apple attaches a starting price of $899 price tag to its MacBook Air. Hewlett Packard has yet to announce details on pricing but this will come to light as the February 2015 release of the HP EliteBook Folio 1020 draws near.