I have an 3437u-i5 equiped 9470m folio, 1600x900 resolution and 16gb of ram. The normal battery on power saver connected to 3G runs for about 7 to 8 hours.
Yes, it is a little noisy but that's it..

I have one of these with the 1600x900 display.
Indoors I have the display up on full so I am outdoors right now in the full sun. With all the comments around 200cdm etc I thought this would be impossible.

The display must be partially transreflective because it is quite visible with the full sun on it above and behind me. Even if I turn the brightness to zero with the sun above and behind me I can still just see this comment I'm writing...
With the sun in front and above, it is still ok but not as bright because the sun is not contributing and there is some minor glare from the shiny case/keyboard area.

Also 8 hours battery?? It's more like 4 hours. Minimum power usage on linux mint is about 8.8W with min  brightness and not doing antything. Normal unintensive use is half to full screen brightness 10-12W. 52Wh/12 = 4.3h which is about right. HD Movies or processor intensive stuff push it closer to 15W.

Since you can upgrade it, I've put a 1tb hdd in the spare dock and use it for storage and upgraded to 8gb ram. Most of the time the hdd is off and using no power. I was surprised to find adding the ram did not increase power consumption significantly, I could not see a difference before and after.
One downside is using an external solar charger or 3rd party psu you need to put a 100k ohm resistor to the centre pin from +19v or nothing happens. Not happy but better than a digital signal! The only other downside is it isn't haswell.

I think HP has done really well. I've got the ultrabook I wanted with built in storage, 8gb ram, and all the ports you could ever want (except HDMI).

7 hours?? how i can barely get 4..4.5 h on power saver...?

 I received one hp 9470m laptop for Work but with a 1600x900 screen resolución, a 256gb SSD,  and 8gb of ram. This Computer is super fast, and it's very light compared with the normal bussines Computers I used to have. I will recommend it for Work;  turning it on and off is fast. I used to avoid using My Work Computers at home because the customised OS windows My company uses take a lot of time to boots up,  and power off. But not with this laptop. Now I'm ready to Work in less than a minute. I really recommend the HP 9470m for Work . I'm really Happy with this Computer.

who wants to kill one's ears? I own it now since 2 weeks (heavy user) and compare it to an X1 and an Apple 15" Retina (all equiped "to the max"). None is louder than the HP (by far). However, none is quicker in booting its OS (Win 8) than the HP. Would I buy it agin? No way. My ears Need a rest now, I gonna Switch back to my macbook pro with Parallels running Win 8 there. Even my Mac Pro (Early 2008, 8 cores) is not as loud as the 9470m...

The PCIe ports on the bottom, are those PCIe 2x or 3.0? The chipset allows for such a connection, http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/chipsets/performance-chipsets/mobile-chipset-qm77.html

Any news?

The specs in this review say "1024 MB" but the review says 4 GB...

Great review as usual, and awesome notebook (I'm surprised it only got 85% compared to something like 89% and 90% for the Macbook Air and Asus Zenbook). The service bay is something that really stands out about this machine, I have been avoiding other ultrabooks which have soldered RAM, soldered SSD or proprietary SSD, fixed battery, etc but the HP 9470m is different from all of them.

FYI HP has actually announced that a 'high res' 1600x900 display will be available for the 9470m in March (source: http://hpfansite.com/2013/01/hp-add-1600-900-high-res-display-option-elitebook-folio-9470m-march/)