Tech

HP Spectre x360: A thin, all-metal Broadwell convertible starting at $899

Hands-on: It’s not a perfect design, but it can hang with the Yoga and XPS 13.

Andrew Cunningham – Mar 1, 2015 4:00 pm | 39

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Most of the announcements coming out of Mobile World Congress are about, you know, mobile things. HP is going against the grain though, taking advantage of the hustle and bustle of the show to launch the Spectre x360. It’s a new convertible Ultrabook that serves as the company’s answer to both Lenovo’s Yoga line and Dell’s most recent XPS 13.

Lenovo’s original Yoga was probably the best of the early Windows 8 convertible designs, since it focused mostly on adding a touchscreen and some versatility to what was otherwise a fairly straightforward laptop. Most of the PC OEMs are shipping their own Yoga clones at this point, and the x360 is just HP’s take on the same idea—its hinge opens a full 360 degrees until the back of the lid is pressed against the bottom of the base.

This enables presentation-friendly “tent” and “stand” modes to the laptop, as well as a watching-movies-in-bed-friendly tablet mode. Like the Yoga, the keyboard on the back and the general size and weight of a 13-inch notebook make it a poor general-purpose tablet. These modes all work fine if you need them, but the Spectre shines brightest when used as a laptop.

Where the Spectre trumps the Yoga is in its general construction. Even the top-end Yogas are predominantly made of plastic, but the x360 is all aluminum. The chassis is surprisingly thin but still very solid. There’s no flexing throughout the body of the laptop, and you have to press down hard to reveal any flex in the keyboard area. At 15.9mm thick and 3.3 pounds, it’s by no means the smallest or lightest 13.3-inch laptop you can buy, but it’s competitive with most of the other Haswell and Broadwell Ultrabooks we’ve seen.

The laptop includes a good collection of ports: three USB 3.0 ports, an SD card reader, a full-size HDMI port, and a mini DisplayPort. Since it supports DisplayPort 1.2 and is driven by one of Intel’s HD 5500 GPUs, it should be capable of pushing a 4K display at 60Hz. Power and volume buttons are also included on the sides—side-mounted power buttons can be kind of annoying since it’s easy to press them while you’re moving the laptop around. It’s the Spectre’s one annoying concession to its tablet mode.

The keyboard itself uses a standard chiclet-style keyboard with a good layout, and HP says the keys have a full 1.5mm of travel. It’s a pleasure to type on, and there’s barely a learning curve at all if you’re already using a similar chiclet keyboard from the likes of Apple, Dell, or Lenovo.

Our one complaint would be about the backlight, which is problematic for two reasons. First, you need to turn it on manually, while most other keyboards turn their backlights on and off based on the ambient light in the room you’re in. Second, because the keys are silver and the backlight is a relatively dim white, this can actually make some of them difficult to read in dim light. It’s a problem we observed on Acer’s Aspire S7 Ultrabook, too—the dim light plus the silver keys creates a kind of grey-on-grey effect that isn’t as easy to read as white-on-black.

As you’ve probably noticed in the pictures already, one of the Spectre’s other quirks is an ultra-wide trackpad, something HP says was added based on user feedback. Palm rejection is a major concern, but the trackpad never seemed to have a problem ignoring our hands while we were typing. And it’s undeniably nice to have a larger usable surface.

That said, the trackpad is hampered by the problem that afflicts most PC touchpads—it’s just tweaky enough to be frustrating. Sometimes clicks don’t register as clicks, and sometimes tapping to click makes it freak out and highlight a bunch of text instead of doing what you wanted it to do.

HP says it’s using Synaptics’ driver stack rather than Microsoft’s Precision Touchpad spec (something we enjoyed about Dell’s XPS 13) because it didn’t offer enough flexibility, particularly when it came to palm rejection. Hopefully the Windows 10 version of the spec is mature enough to free us from these Synaptics drivers once and for all.

In our short time with the laptop, we haven’t grown quite as attached to it as we are to Dell’s XPS 13, which offers similar specs and screen size in a smaller package that costs about the same price. But if you want a touchscreen with your laptop the Spectre gives you more wiggle room: Dell only includes touch starting with its higher-end $1,299 model, a laptop that also comes with a beautiful but battery-draining 3200×1800 screen. HP includes touch in all models of the Spectre x360.

Pricing starts at $899. That will get you a 1080p IPS touchscreen, a Broadwell Core i5-5200U with the HD 5500 integrated GPU, 4GB of RAM, and a 128GB SATA SSD (RAM is soldered to the motherboard, as is common in these machines). The $999 model is probably the sweet spot, since it doubles your RAM and SSD capacities to 8GB and 256GB, respectively. For $1,149, you swap the Core i5 out for a Core i7. And beginning in April, you can buy a $1,399 version that adds a 2560×1440 touchscreen and a 512GB SSD.

The chips it uses are the same ones as the XPS 13, so looking at those benchmark scores should give you some idea of how well it performs.

The $899 and $1,149 versions of the Spectre are available from HP starting today and from Best Buy beginning March 15. We’ve asked when and where we can expect to see the $999 model, and we’ll post an update when we get a response. We’ve got the Spectre x360 in our hands now and we’ll be posting a full review—including performance benchmarks and battery testing—in the coming weeks.

Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

39 Comments