HP Spectre 13 review: an exceedingly well-executed return to the basics

HP Spectre 13 $1,000.00 The HP Spectre 13 nails the fundamentals, and its innovative trackpad works great with Windows 8.

HP’s Spectre 13 runs Windows 8, but it doesn’t contort, flip, swivel, or do any of the other impractical tricks that look so fun in advertisements. It’s not a tablet strapped to a dock, or a tablet with a keyboard cover, either. It’s just a regular ol’ Ultrabook. A very, very good Ultrabook.

Windows 8 has Microsoft and PC manufacturers like HP trapped between a rock and a hard place. The new operating system was supposed to keep the PC relevant in a world increasingly dominated by sleek, shiny touchscreen devices. That gambit has largely failed, leaving hardware manufacturers little recourse but to throw devices at the wall to see what might stick. So we get 2-in-1s, convertibles, detachables, and all manner of confusing hybrids, when what we really want is a thin-and-light notebook with a great keyboard, a high-res display, and the power to tackle nearly any workload.

So how near does the Spectre 13 come to delivering that ideal design? Pretty darn close. It also leverages one of Windows 8’s key features—touch—to deliver a significant innovation in usability: An almost comically wide touchpad dubbed the Control Zone. More on that shortly.

HP's Spectre 13 boasts a very attractive industrial design. 

The Spectre 13 looks a lot like Apple’s MacBook Air. That’s probably not the praise HP is looking for, but put the two side by side and you’d be hard pressed to tell them apart. No shame there: Both machines are exceedingly attractive pieces of hardware. The Spectre 13’s aluminum unibody chassis feels sturdy without being especially heavy (it weighs in at 3.3-pounds). I’d argue that its “truffle brown” lid is closer to "purple onion," but I’ve never had much of an eye for fashion. The shade is distinctive though, and shiny in a way that doesn’t feel too ostentatious.

Under the hood, you’ll find a fourth-generation Intel Core i5-4200U CPU paired with 4GB of DDR3/1600 memory. The 128GB SSD feels a bit cramped, but you can double the storage for an additional $150. The PC packs Intel’s integrated graphics, so you won't get much in the way of gaming performance, but turning down settings will do in a pinch. Those components are good enough to earn a respectable WorldBench 8.1 score of 270. One shortcoming you won’t be able to fix: the Spectre 13’s cooling fan. It kicks in when the processor starts doing any heavy lifting, and the noise can be annoying.

You can order the Spectre 13 with a higher-resolution 2560-by-1440-pixel display for just $70 more.

HP’s claim of 9 hours of battery life is a little overblown, but we managed to squeeze 7.5 hours out of it in our battery-rundown test. That’s an hour-plus more than what Sony’s VAIO Pro 13 delivered, and nearly 2 hours more than Lenovo’s ThinkPad Yoga.

The keyboard feels great. The wide, spacious, backlit keys are easy to reach, and while I’m always a trifle annoyed when the arrow keys are squished into narrow little spaces, it’s a worthy sacrifice to ensure everything else has a bit of breathing room. The primary role for the row of function keys up top is media-player control. If you want to use them as traditional F keys, you’ll need to hold down the FN key—and I imagine that’ll be perfectly fine with most people. Few apps rely on the function keys anymore, but everyone uses their laptop as a media player.

(Note: Click on the charts below to enlarge them.)

And then there’s the Control Zone, which is designed to ease your transition to Windows 8 by translating the new OS’s touch gestures into actions you can perform right on the touchpad.

Slide your finger along the touchpad, and you’ll notice it’s flanked by matte, almost chalky borders. These distinct zones behave like the edges of a touchscreen in Windows 8: Swipe in from the left, and you’ll quickly cycle between apps; press the zone on the left for a quick list of your open apps. Swipe and hold, and you’ll be able to pin apps onto your screen. The same goes for the zone on the right, which can call up Windows 8’s charms. If you’re at all familiar with Windows 8’s gestures, you’ll be right at home here.

The Control Zone doesn’t alleviate any of Windows 8’s irritations, but it does make the Windows 8 experience feel a bit more—traditional; natural, even.

Keyboards—especially the ones on laptops—have conditioned us to navigating apps using easy, fluid motions, with our hands never straying too far from the same general area. Jabbing at our laptop’s screen just to slide between apps feels silly—at least, at first. The Control Zone rather successfully eases that transition by reinforcing Windows 8’s gesture lessons in a format we’re familiar with. It probably helps that it’s nice and responsive—the only thing worse than trying to learn new gestures is trying to learn new gestures with sluggish hardware.

Once you’ve wrapped your head around the gestures (there aren’t many), you start to realize how awesome Windows 8 can be. The Spectre 13 couldn’t be marketed as an Ultrabook if it didn’t have a touchscreen, even though that feature doesn’t feel entirely necessary once you’ve spent some time with the spruced-up touchpad. And this 13.3-inch, 1920-by-1080-pixel display is nice and bright, with excellent viewing angles. You might have trouble in direct sunlight, but things are fine otherwise. Photos and videos look great, but if you’d like higher resolution, you can upgrade to a 2560-by-1440-pixel display for another $70.

Whatever your opinion of Beats Audio—I think their headphones are overpriced and gaudy—I’ve yet to find fault with their many audio collaborations with HP, and the Spectre 13’s speakers are very good. You’ll want headphones or proper speakers for extended listening sessions, as the two tiny speakers sitting on either side of the laptop’s underside can’t work miracles, but they pump out rich, well-rounded audio with Beats’ signature appreciation for a bit of bass.

I was also pleased to see relatively little in the way of bloatware. McAfee Antivirus is preinstalled, but you get a one-year subscription if you opt in. And HP Connected Music a makes half-hearted attempt to sell you music. Finally, you’ll find the full, retail version of Adobe Lightroom 5, which leads me to wonder: Is preinstalled software bloatware if it’s welcome and useful?

HP’s Spectre 13 won’t convert the Windows 8-wary—that uphill chore is Microsoft’s burden. But laptops like this that nail the fundamentals and don’t trip over themselves trying to reinvent the wheel in an effort to make touch relevant to PCs will certainly aid in that effort.

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Review: HP Spectre XT TouchSmart is a sweet-looking, underpowered laptop in an Ultrabook’s clothing

I was a big fan of Ultrabooks—or at least the concept of Ultrabooks—when they first debuted in 2012. After all, who doesn’t like the idea of sliver-thin laptops that run Windows?

Unfortunately, it seems like the definition of an Ultrabook has since expanded to include any relatively sleek-looking ultraportable laptop—other specs be darned. HP’s latest Spectre XT TouchSmart shows how the definition can stretch in awkward ways. It’s got the look of an ultrabook—and it’s a great look. The touchscreen display is awesome. But the weight puts it closer to a mainstream notebook computer, and it suffers from the shorter battery life (but not the higher performance) of a desktop replacement. It's a luxe-looking laptop for your living room, which may be all some people want, but it's not really an Ultrabook.

The Spectre XT TouchSmart still (barely) meets Ultrabook standards. It’s under 0.9-inch thick, it’s got an Intel Core i7 processor and an SSD boot drive, and so on. But it weighs in at almost five pounds--4.96, to be precise, which is a half-pound heavier than a 15-inch MacBook Pro. It’s trying hard to be an Ultrabook, but it’s too heavy to qualify.

It sure looks good, though. HP may have dropped the “Envy” moniker from its Spectre line, but this is still an eye-catching computer. The Spectre XT TouchSmart (we reviewed the 15-4010nr model, which starts at $1400) has a brushed-aluminum cover with lightly tapered edges and a soft-touch, rubbery bottom. Inside, the keyboard deck sports the cover’s same brushed-aluminum pattern. The backlit, island-style keyboard sits behind a large glass trackpad.

The Spectre’s biggest win is its display, which is a 15.6-inch IPS touchscreen with a native resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. The screen looks awesome, with bright, crisp colors, excellent contrast, and decent off-axis viewing angles. The display isn’t quite as bright as I’d like, and the glossiness can cause some issues in bright sunlight, but these are minor issues. This is also one of the best touchscreens I’ve used: it’s responsive, gestures are smooth, and touch is very accurate.

The rest of the Spectre’s input options—that is, the keyboard and the glass trackpad—are also very good. The keyboard’s island-style keys are a tad on the small side, but they offer decent feedback and are easy to type on quickly and accurately. The trackpad is smooth and accurate, if a little overly sensitive at times. Luckily, the trackpad has a small box in the upper left corner that you can use to toggle it on and off.

General prettiness aside, this Spectre has some problems that I just can’t overlook in an Ultrabook.

First of all, it’s got terrible battery life. In our lab tests, we managed to eke out two hours and 52 minutes worth of battery on HP’s recommended settings. To put this into perspective, most of the Ultrabooks I’ve seen get around five (or more) hours, while most of the desktop replacements I’ve seen get around two and half hours.

It’s not particularly fast, either. While the Spectre does perform fairly well for its class (it scored 61 out of 100 on WorldBench 8), it’s nowhere near desktop-replacement status.

The other real issue I noticed with the Spectre was its audio playback. HP has been working with Beats Audio for some time now to boost the quality of its laptop speakers. For the most part, this partnership has been yielding excellent results. Sound from the Spectre’s native speakers is tinny and grinding, however, with no bass to speak of. It’s actually kind of painful to listen to, and there’s clearly no Beats Audio enhancement at work. The Beats Audio is there—you’ll hear it when you plug headphones into the laptop. But really, don’t even think about playing audio over the laptop’s native speakers.

HP is clearly marketing the HP Spectre XT TouchSmart to the Ultrabook-cool crowd, but it doesn’t quite fit. It looks great when it’s sitting here on my desk—hooked up to external speakers and a power block—but it’s hardly something I’d want to tote around with me on a regular basis. And it would definitely need to have better battery life, speaker quality, and weight before it could really be called an Ultrabook.

Sarah is a freelance writer and editor based in Silicon Valley. She has a love/hate relationship with social media and a bad habit of describing technology as "sexy."
More by Sarah Jacobsson Purewal

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HP Envy 14 Spectre Review: Beefing Up the Ultrabook

First impressions are important, and the HP Envy 14 Spectre makes a great one. The glossy, glass-topped display bezel and keyboard tray look elegant and understated, and the uniform, thin chassis gives the laptop a sleek appearance. Second impressions are a little less positive, though: When you pick up the Spectre, it seems heftier than you’d expect. That’s because HP covered it in impact-resistant glass, similar to what you might see on a high-end smartphone. That pretty glass top is a fingerprint magnet, too.

Encapsulating the monitor bezel in glass, however, allowed HP to build a 14-inch display into tight quarters--the Specre offers essentially the same width and length as most 13.3-inch Ultrabooks do. HP took advantage of the bigger display area, packing in a 1600-by-900-pixel native-resolution LED-backlit IPS panel. It looks great, and it offers superb video playback fidelity. Rather than matching the tapered shape of many competitors, the Spectre is just under 0.9 inch thin (barely meeting the Ultrabook specs that Intel set) throughout, which makes the system seem somehow larger than other laptops in its class. It also weighs more than many Ultrabooks (a spot-on 4 pounds without the power brick), partly due to the glass surface and partly because of the larger LCD panel.

The LCD panel offers excellent horizontal viewing angles, and good vertical viewing from above the laptop. If you look from below the plane of the sweet spot, however, color and contrast shifting are severe. The screen is very evenly lit, probably owing to the LED backlight. Color saturation is good, and video looks quite nice, particularly high-definition video. The 1600-by-900-pixel display also makes editing photos a bit easier than systems with a more standard 1366-by-768-pixel display typically do. You can put that display to good use right away, since HP includes full versions of Photoshop Elements 10 and Premiere Elements 10.

Performance, on the other hand, is a little disappointing, trailing behind that of similar systems in the class, such as the Dell XPS 13. The Spectre posted a mark of 106 on WorldBench 7, the second-lowest in comparison with four similar Ultrabooks, but good overall performance nonetheless. Plus, the Envy 14 generated slightly lower scores in our Web-performance tests. The higher-resolution display likely has some impact on performance, but having all those extra pixels makes up a little for the slightly lower scores. Battery life was about average for the class, at 6 hours, 29 minutes.

Like most Ultrabooks, the Envy 14 Spectre is somewhat lacking in expansion ports, offering a scant two USB connections (one USB 3.0 and the other USB 2.0). All of the system's ports, including the two USB ports, the gigabit ethernet jack, the headphone jack, the SD Card slot, and the HDMI and mini-DisplayPort video outputs, are on the left side. I would like to see at least four USB connections on these units--the chipset supports that, and the Spectre certainly has enough chassis real estate for them.

The base model of the Spectre includes a 128GB solid-state drive; HP offers a 256GB SSD as an option. You won't find a built-in optical drive, but that’s pretty typical for this class of system. Connectivity comes in the form of 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, and wired ethernet. HP doesn’t offer an option for built-in LTE or any other wireless broadband technology.

Audio is a mixed bag. At moderate volume, HP’s Beats Audio equalization system enables music and movie content that sounds richer than on most laptop speakers, but if you crank the volume past about 60 percent, you can hear noticeable speaker distortion. If you want louder audio, you’ll need to use headphones. The Spectre offers a convenient analog-style volume dial on the right side.

Like most Ultrabooks, the Envy 14 Spectre uses Intel’s HD 3000 graphics technology, so it’s suitable for only light-duty PC gaming at lower resolutions and detail levels.

The keyboard offers an excellent feel, although the spacebar is slightly recessed, which results in mashed-together words when you miss pressing the spacebar all the way down. The touchpad is one of the best we’ve seen on a Windows laptop, coming close to the feel and usability of the larger trackpads built into Apple’s MacBook Air. Full support for multitouch gestures, proper button sensitivity, and tapping anywhere to make a right mouse click are welcome.

You’ll need to weigh a few trade-offs with the Spectre: It has a bit more heft and slightly reduced performance compared with most Ultrabooks, but it also offers a much better display, a good keyboard, and an excellent pointing device. It’s also not inexpensive, with the base unit costing about $1299 (as of March 29, 2012), so you should factor that in as well. In the end, HP’s Envy 14 Spectre falls just short of being a classic--but it doesn’t disappoint, either.

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