Old Dog, New Tricks: HP Spectre x360 Review

With refreshed internals, a sleek body and a bewitching screen, the 2018 HP Spectre X360 is a beauty to behold. But is it any good?

The Spectre X360 is one of the better laptops that HP currently makes. Overall, it is a great everyday device for a young professionalkeen to impress those around them. Make no mistake, the X360 was designed keeping aesthetics in mind. No element of the laptop that is visible on the outside is simply functional. Even the HP logo at the top of the lid is styled aggressively and gives the portable all-in-one a sophisticated look. But, how does it fare where it really matters?

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The laptop is well built with strong and smooth hinges, so opening the lid using one hand is easy. The 13.3 inch, fullHD touch display, with its thin bezels allow more screen real estate in a relatively small form factor. Instead of a simple mesh for the Bang & Olufsen speakers, we get a grill for that is aesthete with a unique design. The aluminium body has no considerable flex and speaks volumes of the laptop’s premium feel.

For the internals, we have a powerful Intel i7 8550U at 1.8 GHz, which can easily boost upto 4.0 GHz, feeding 16 GBs,2133 MHz memory.The 512 GB NVMe SSD is snappy as expected. Consequently, boot times are minimal and for most basic tasks, like browsing the Internet, working on spreadsheets and word processors, the Spectre X360 does not break a sweat at all. The battery life is great as well, lasted for about 10 hours on a charge. Plus, it supports Fast Charge that enables you to go from zero per cent to 50 per cent in about 30 minutes.

For your entertainment, watching YouTube videos and Netflix are a joy on this machine, inspite of the small screen. The B&O quad speaker set up is loud enough to fill a medium sized room, with a properly balanced soundstage. The inbuilt camera is great, capable of recording videos at 1080p at 30 frames per second, which is more than adequate for your Skype calls.

What hurts the laptop is the missing dedicated graphic solution. Intel 620 is woefully inadequate for any serious graphics processing, and this shows when you try to run recent games. We tried playing Fortnite, but the gameplay at high settings at 1080p was justplayable. During our tests, the temperatures went up significantly, but not high enough to throttle performance. Still, certain parts of the laptop, especially near the speaker grill became a little uncomfortable to touch. The keyboard too is lacklustre, mainly because of its mushy keys. There are a lot of laptop keyboards that fare far worse than this one, and they are as expensive as the Spectre, if not more. What saves this keyboard is the backlight.

For the ports, we have a generous number of USB Type C port with Thunderbolt 3. Other than this, there is no good news as such. It has just one USB Type A port (good thing that is a 3.1 though), a mic/headphone combo jack, and a Micro-SD slot. If you need more ports, such as an Ethernet port, another Type A USB, and a display port, you have to deal with a number of dongles, which HPincludes in the box.

One benefit of this portable is the fact that it can be used as tablet. The Active Pen included in the box is great to use if you are taking notes or working on a something simple. The pen requires a certain amount of pressure, which we were not really comfortable with. During our testing, there were times when we thought that prolonged usage would cause a deep and noticeable scratch, but thanks to the Corning Gorilla glass, this seems unlikely. Thus, the tablet orientation is good enough for certain graphical tasks such asediting photos, sketchingetc.

Verdict

All in all, the Spectre X360 is targeted at working professionals. Certain light content creation is possible, but given the form factor, the expectations need to be kept in check. What becomes a reason for pain is the fact that the X360 is priced north of ₹1,60,000thatis achingly expensive for a laptop that does not have dedicated graphics. This laptop is very specifically targeted – working professionals who have an eye for the aesthete, who do not care much about price to performance ratios and want a good multi-form ultra portable.

From the November 2018 issue of FHM India.