when i first heard hp was making a laptop wrapped in leather
i knew we had to get one if for no reason other than to poke fun of people
with more money than brains but once i found out about its heaps of
battery life gigabit lte connectivity and
super interesting hinge design
i started to come around to the notion that the spectre folio might be more
than just a pretty face we could be looking at right now
a serious contender against the macbook air and the surface laptop
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there are two things you're going to after you figure out the stupid pending
there are two things you're going to immediately notice about the spectre
folio first that it's covered in leather and
second the leather smells really good
it's actually kind of amazing how much a scent can change
our perceptions like pulling this machine out of your bag there's like
this this feeling of uh for me anyway of
like readiness like the the closest analogs that i have are pulling on my
riding gloves and kind of stretching them out a little bit
or cinching up a horse saddle ready to
mount like it's just it's kind of crazy and it also feels
great to hold with its nicely rounded spine it just feels
professional but once opened up my feelings about the
spectre folio do get a touch more complicated
so the way that the leather wraps around the screen creates this kind of weird
looking double bezel i i
really wish they could have had the leather end right at the edge of the
display and overall i think given another generation they can probably
improve the way that the metal components transition to the leather
ones and then there's this pen holder
frankly speaking it's stupid like could they not figure
out any better way to secure this to the
side of the display honestly i would rather they had just done nothing i'd
rather they say wear a shirt with a pocket in the front and put it there
because other than that the overall feel of the machine
is very solid there's virtually no flex
to this thing and i trust hp when they say that the leather is not going to
wear quickly like this is really nice it's the same kind of stuff you might
find in say a mercedes now io is pretty
bare bones-ish but overall the three usb-c ports two of which are Thunderbolt
3 all of which can be used for charging give you a lot of flexibility to connect
other devices to the folio provided you're willing to carry a dongle or two
and a headphone jack is thankfully present
now the display comes in both 1080p and 4k varieties ours rocks the 1080p one
and given the screen size i really don't see any need to go higher than that and
thankfully hp has provided the option to
have touchscreen on either resolution
good work you guys a problem with the display though is
that it feels like there is a lot of wasted vertical real estate here like
going from a surface laptop or a 2018 macbook air to the folio is gonna be
jarring and it's made that much worse by this massive chin bar hanging out here
that would in a perfect world just be more display for a 16 by 10 aspect ratio
it is nice to see a fairly good webcam implementation though and the inclusion
of Windows hello facial recognition is a huge plus overall the display still gets
an a for its excellent brightness colors and touch support which goes well of
course with the convertible nature of the spectre folio this is quite
possibly its strongest point like this is a really smart two-in-one laptop
design it's got these nice strong magnets so you can still operate it like
a normal laptop but put a little bit of pressure like this and
boom moving from one mode to the other is very simple and the ever so slight
incline when it's in tablet mode allows the included pen to be used very
comfortably again though i really hate the way it secures to the device but
the writing experience is solid comparable to that of the surface pro
even if it doesn't quite keep up with the near instantaneous responsiveness of
the ipad pro now you do carry around
more bulk than the surface pro but
i mean i think that's a trade-off a lot of people would be willing to make for
the ability to use the folio on their lap without it kind of falling off and
it's really nice that unlike some two-in-ones the keyboard is not going to
end up getting scratched up in tablet mode so it just looks kind of ratty and
gross after a short while the speakers are pretty good with
excellent clarity making them great for hearing dialogue like NVIDIA calls
obviously very business oriented products but as you might expect they do
lack bass and their grill takes up a lot
of space at the top of the notebook that i just i really wish could have been
used to move up the keyboard and make space for a bigger trackpad
look at this poor thing actually we should talk about the
keyboard first um here's what i can say about that that's positive
if you finger pack or you type pretty heavily you might actually really like
it the travel and the tactile feedback are both solid
but for both me and alex and we do often
disagree about these things the stiffness of the key switches and
some noticeable inconsistency in their key stabilization made it really
difficult to get into a groove and maintain our top typing speeds that's a
shame now the experience will be better if you have smaller hands since your
palms will sit on this delightful leather palm rest instead of on the edge
of the device but when you compare it to the comfort of the surface laptop and
the macbook air it just doesn't quite hold up and then coming back to the
track pad well it's also kind of meh there's slightly
more force required to click it than i'd like and this completely rules out
alex's thumb padding technique while he's typing and it's out of the box
acceleration curve is weird at best it kind of seems like they're compensating
for something you know what i'm talking about no like literally it seems like they're
compensating for the small size of the touchpad to make sure you can actually
get all the way across the screen overall it gets i don't know c plus so
that was the pretty bad stuff but there are more good things lte support
means that you can be productive from basically anywhere like it baffles me
that features that we take for granted on couple hundred dollar smartphones
like sim slots and decent cameras have
taken so long to take off in ultrabooks
maybe this is changing though so a device like this along with cheaper data
will make it so that you don't have to worry about things like airport hotel or
coffee shop wi-fi and all the security concerns that go along with them and
this feature is perfectly complemented by the spectre folio's incredible
battery life the shocking
54.3 watt hour battery in this thing
complemented by a low power processor and one watt display means that you can
expect lg ground levels of freedom with the folio even if it is a touch heavier
and the low power processor brings other benefits the spectre folio is completely
passively cooled and comes with a built-in coffee break feature that is to
say that in short tasks the dual core core i7 is pretty snappy but if you ask
this thing to do anything even remotely resembling heavy lifting like even just
installing a program you might find that you've got a minute to run over to the
break room and see if anyone brought in snacks today okay yeah i was being
facetious there that's not really a feature um and honestly this was kind of
a confusing thing about this device to me because
on hp's reviewer's guide the number one
pain point that hp identified for millennials was performance
but then that's where they ended up making the spectorfolio's biggest
sacrifice well i mean other than the cow that they slaughtered in order to
manufacture it the dual core processor makes it
noticeably slower while performing tasks like basic video editing working on
small cad files and doing more serious photo work and this wouldn't be a
problem except that basically every other ultrabook on the market
with the notable exception of the macbook air has twice the core count at
least as an available option and with the spectre folio coming in at about the
same price as the surface laptop that
makes it tough to recommend it gets some things really right like
the hinge design the battery life and mobile internet and it really does feel
good but it gets enough things wrong but i
find myself intrigued to see where they'll go with the next one
rather than ready to pull the trigger today
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