This 2024 HP Spectre laptop is a productivity powerhouse

I’ve long been a fan of HP’s Spectre x360 flagship notebook. It’s a good-looking premium laptop that exudes luxury thanks to its on-point design and quality build. It was also the first laptop to introduce me to how crazily useful a folding screen and pen can be.

My first impression of the 2024 Spectre when unboxing the review model was that it was a sleek little number. Picking it up and opening its lid revealed a glossy glass display panel and a stylish yet solid alloy chassis finished in a dark blue-grey.

Its keyboard (as I’d come to expect from earlier HP notebook PCs) is of decent quality, with well-spaced keys that offer plenty of travel and good tactile feedback. The trackpad is also roomy, with force feedback from a haptic motor. It’s precise and accurate.

The Spectre’s slim, wedge-like design has rounded edges and corners, making the review unit easy to pick up and hold. Even though it weighs 1.4kg, its compact design makes chucking it into a laptop bag no great hardship. The Spectre is available in 12″, 14″ and 16″ models.

There isn’t much on the front of the port, which is no surprise given its ultra-compact design. On its rear corner, you get two USB-C (Thunderbolt) ports (one of which is used with the bundled power supply), a 3.5mm headphone socket, and a USB-A port. As with most compact notebook PCs, we recommend buying a portable USB-C/Thunderbolt hub if you have more than a few devices to connect.

When it comes to wireless, the Spectre is the first laptop I’ve seen with Wi-Fi 7 support. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to get my hands on any Wi-Fi network gear, which makes talking about its performance a tad tricky. Nonetheless, the addition of Wi-Fi 7 adds a solid dollop of future-proofing. If the hype is correct, the Spectre should run like a cut cat with a Wi-Fi 7 router and 10-gigabit fibre.

As you’d expect from an HP notebook, the display is gorgeous. Its 2880×1800 pixel OLED panel is capable of 120Hz dynamic frame rate. Being OLED, you get super vivid colours and crazily good contrast levels. It can crank out an impressive 400 cd/m2, so the display worked brilliantly outdoors, even if its glossy surface was too reflective. According to HP bumf, the display has IMAX Enhanced support, so it should be colour-accurate in theory. In use, I found the upward-facing speakers on either side of the keyboard and front provided a clean, crisp sound that conveyed accurate detail in a surprisingly convincing sound stage, which made watching movies without headphones workable. While it lacks much oomph in the bass department, that’s only to be expected given the Spectre’s super-slinky form factor.

Under its hood sits Intel’s Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 CPU, offering solid performance and more energy-efficiency. Along with the new silicon, you also get Intel’s Arc GPU, which ran games surprisingly well, even if some needed detail levels dropped down a peg to get decent frame rates. The review unit had a generous 16GB DDR5X memory and a zippy 1TB SSD.

The Spectre ran smoothly, and even with the heavy multitasking of demanding apps, I could still browse the web, bash out documents, edit photos, and do some video editing without the Spectre missing a beat.

What really impressed me were the cooling fans. While they kept everything from getting too hot, hardly any fan noise was noticeable. Given the solid performance on offer and non-burning ballscorch benchmarks for cool on-lap computing, the Spectre earns points as a super comfy computer.

Intel’s Meteor Lake Silicon really delivered the goods when it came to battery life. I got over two hours of heavy video editing and gaming before it cried for wall socket quality time. When it came to surfing, email, and document creation, I got just over 18 hours of use. While your mileage will vary depending on what apps you choose to run and how bright your screen is set to, the Spectre’s battery life is nothing to sneeze at.

The integrated webcam offers 4K video capture, but this only occurs if you use HP’s Enhanced Camera feature. There are also other AI-driven camera features such as smart lighting/colour and an eye contact widget so your fellow video meeting attendees will always see you staring into the camera, even when you’re checking emails or playing Wordle, and so on. I was impressed with how well the camera works with Windows Hello face login biometrics. This is thanks to integrated IR sensors, which also provide the Spectre with presence detection, so it will handily lock if you walk away from it. There are also many simple gesture controls that the camera can recognise, all of which felt very Minority Report-like in use.

In short, the only thing missing feature-wise is the kitchen sink. So, the verdict? The Spectre isn’t cheap, but you do get one hell of a lot of laptop for your money. Given its beautiful design, build, and specs, there’s really not much that the Spectre can be faulted on. If you can afford it and are looking for a Windows productivity powerhouse with a beautiful design/build and solid battery life, you really should check out HP’s Spectre.

https://www.hp.com/nz-en/shop/hp-spectre-x360-2-in-1-laptop-14-eu0025tu-9t0j8pa.html