LPGuard’s HP Spectre x360 Review: What’s new with one of the best laptops today?

The HP Spectre x360 boasts of a sleek and stylish design with some of the newest innovations to date. See everything in this review. 

Looking for an elegant convertible laptop with some significant tweaks? Here’s some good news. The Spectre x360 from HP is known as one of the best laptops in the market today. But that’s already a known fact! Today, it got even better thanks to the additional updates that it received recently. 

It’s an elegant convertible laptop. It just ditched the old 13.3-inch touch screen and 16:9 aspect ratio. Instead, you’ll get a squarer 13.5-inch screen and a 3:2 aspect ratio. As a result, you’ll receive a superior view of everything you’re doing. You can also add the beautiful OLED screen technology, a stylus pen, and a USB Type-A port. 

What’s New With The HP Spectre x360

Aside from the aforementioned tweaks on the hardware, the Spectre x360 boasts of some of the latest innovations. This includes the 11th Gen Tiger Lake processor, Iris Xe integrated graphics, this integrates with the power of Core i5 and 8GB of memory, an ultra-fast Thunderbolt 4 port, 256 GB SSD storage, and 1920x1280p touch screen.  

Moreover, it also features HP’s Sure View Reflect privacy screen. But this is only optional. There’s also a rechargeable tilt pen and a carrying sleeve. Thanks to its smart design, the stylus holds onto the side of the laptop using a magnet. They eliminated using the old-school fittings. 

If you think you’ve seen it all, you’re wrong. There’s more. Actually, the fun is just getting started. HP surely stepped its game. They included the beautiful OLED touch panel with 3000x2000p resolution. This means the laptop carries 100% coverage of DCI-P3 color gamut along with a quad-core 2.8GHz Core i7-1165G7 CPU, up to 16GB of RAM, 32GB Intel Optane Memory, and a 1TB NVMe SSD storage. 

Furthermore, the Spectre x360 is one of the most captivating laptops in the market. The company even offers gem-cut contrast edges with CNC-machine aluminum chassis. Likewise, it’s available in Poseidon Blue along with Pale Brass Accents, Nightfall Black with Copper Luxe accents, and a shy silver model for an additional $10. 

Also, there are two hinges that are holding the display. Thanks to this, the screen does not wobble when you tap in laptop mode. Since it’s originally a convertible laptop, you can choose between easel, tent, and tablet modes. This option works best for hybrid users. 

The laptop measures 0.67×11.8×8.7 inches. It’s slightly deeper compared to the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1. It also comes with super-thin bezels that are about 90.33% screen to body ratio. With this, they even placed the webcam properly positioned above. 

On the left side, there’s a USB 3.2 Type-A port, while the two Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports are located at the right. There’s also a microSD card slot and an audio jack on the diagonal-rear corner. 

An attractive display

It’s unprecedented. The Spectre x360’s 3:2 aspect ratio is almost unprecedented. While it’s used in Microsoft’s Surface Pro tablets and Surface Laptop, once you get used to the taller view, you’ll find it hard to go back to the old 16:9 screen. 

One of the best features of the x360 is the OLED screen. It’s lovely! It has enough brightness, high contrast, ultra-white background, and deep blacks. As a result, you get rich, vibrant, vivid, and sharp colors. There’s also the two-button tilt stylus that offers faster swipes and scribbles when used in tablet mode. 

The stylus also offers a comfortable, almost pen-on-paper feel and a good palm rejection for your wrist. Moreover, the webcam is a 720p with IR face recognition ability. It also comes with a fingerprint reader that allows you to access Windows Hello logins. 

The images are bright, colorful, and static-free. Unfortunately, sometimes images appear to be slightly soft-focused. There are four speakers and an amplifier. The sound is good but not really loud. It’s just average without being tinny and hollow; the good thing is the noticeable bass. 

Good thing it incorporates the Bang and Olufsen software to help you choose the music, movie, and even voice presets together with the fiddle and equalizer. 

The pop-up HP Command Center allows you to turn on the app-based network prioritization. You can also modify the Smart Sense system for tuning and cooling the fan speeds to cool, balanced, performance, or quiet modes. There’s also the Focus Mode toggle that dims the screen except for the active window. 

Performance 

Fortunately, the Spectre beats the Yoga devices thanks to the fast SSD. The test was done through a PCMark 10 for excellent productivity testing. Another good thing about the x360 is with the Cinebench test. This test predicts the video editing capabilities of any laptop and tablet. 

Spectre x360 gave a solid performance. The test included running on a custom Photoshop image-editing benchmark. This was done using 10 complex filters and effects for the standard JPEG image. 

Additionally, this laptop offers fast performance and solid display, making it a great choice for photo and video editing tasks. 

Battery Life

At full-charge, the x360 comes with notable battery-conserving tweaks. The battery test included a video rundown, 50% screen brightness, and 100% volume. This was done until the system stopped. The OLED screens have noticeable effects on battery life. 

Conclusion 

There’s fierce competition in the high-end laptop space. However, we see a significant advantage with the 3:2 aspect ratio that the HP Spectre x360 brings to the table. If you add the 14-inch screen, then you have a game-changer. This doesn’t even include the stunning OLED display. 

Unfortunately, there’s no HDMI port included. All-in-all, this convertible laptop features an amazingly beautiful design with OLED goodness. And the 14-inch size makes it relatively easy to carry making it a great choice for on-the-go professionals.