HP Envy 14 Spectre Ultrabook with Beats Audio & Gorilla Glass Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
2,318 words · ~11 min read
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welcome to my unboxing of something that's actually pretty exciting now I
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have to confess this is a bit of a hack because this has been unboxed clearly
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before also this is a French model so um
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for those English folks in the uh in the audience this might be a little bit oh
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no this is oh this is English I think on the inner carton it's French okay so
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14in diagonal Radiance HD plus infinity the LED display so this is a 1600x 900
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display on a 14-in model which means you got pretty good pixel density 128 gig M
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SATA solid state drive although you can get it with a 256 4 gigs of RAM only one
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RAM slot so you're pretty much limited to 4 gigs of RAM although this is sort
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of an Ultrabook style form factor um so you it's not really intended for heavy
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usage wireless land Bluetooth second generation core i5 dual core processor
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at 1.6 GHz genuine Windows 7 Home Premium and let's get this baby open up
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so this is meant to compete directly or
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well let's not say compete directly this is meant to capture the customers who
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want a beautiful premium notebook and
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just aren't interested in OS 10 because
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or 11 are we up to 11 now I don't know whatever whatever Apple's OS is who
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cares cuz it sucks right um although no offense to the Apple users out there
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it's just every time I sit down in front of an Apple OS and try to do something
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actually save for iOS I can handle iOS I I just like horribly break it within a
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matter of seconds so uh here's a little diagram in English and French this is a
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bilingual model of all of the stuff so we're going to save that because that is
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a pretty handy reference for people who do unboxings here is a cool little uh
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neoprene case that it comes in to keep it from getting scratched and damaged
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although that's less of a factor than you might think because this whole
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notebook yes the entire top and I'm sorry see it has fingerprints on it
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already cuz it's to been unboxed before there we go we'll just fix that
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this whole notebook top and
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screen if I could turn it around the
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right way top and screen is done in
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Gorilla Glass so that means this is one of the most scratch resistant notebooks
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you will pretty much ever encounter so you can see here we've got an aluminum
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sort of a looking um just sec
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sorry aluminum sort of looking e finish although it is made of plastic on the
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main part of the shell down here below so this again is plastic as well but it
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feels very very solid and one of the reasons for that is probably the fact
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that it has more glass so there's actually another piece of Gorilla Glass
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right here and what I like about this is on so many notebooks you go to use the
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thing you know it looks great the first time you use it but then after a little
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while you get these horrible ugly like palm prints under the keyboard that just
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look disgusting and awful and there's no
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getting rid of them however if you put glass there as well as glass here almost
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all of the usable surfaces of this entire notebook are going to be
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completely impervious to just incidental damage especially given that they're
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made of Gorilla Glass there's also couple little notes here thank you for
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selecting HP Envy um got a bit about
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your support there so what's cool about the support for this particular model is it has a 2-year warranty and it's
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actually um what you do is you basically call HP
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support and if there's anything they can't solve for you over the phone then
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they will ship you something that you need uh next day so very very cool comes
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with a travel adapter as well as an ac2
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uh DC adapter which hey check that out also includes a little USB auxiliary
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dudad so that means that you can charge your phone at the same time off the same
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charger just by having your laptop plugged in without actually plugging the
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phone directly into the laptop top which I don't know may be more or less of a
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concern to you depending on whether you have a phone or not um let's go back to
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the notebook so let's talk about the external first so this part is
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definitely aluminum and then you can see it is kind of a sandwiched aluminum
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rimmed two pieces of glass thing and you know what yeah this is totally
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appropriate in this case so whether you guys like it or not we are totally
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whipping out the iPhone comparison so you can see the screen here is actually
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about as thick as just the the aluminum portion of the iPhone which is uh it it
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it looks just beautiful guys um we've got a lit HP logo right here and I'm
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trying not to catch SL slick in the reflection here but I don't know if
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there's much that I can do uh very very black looking and then on this side
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what's cool about the LED backlit 1600x 900 screen here is that HP has actually
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gone with a super slim bezel design that
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allowed them to put a 14-in display in what would normally be a 13.3 in
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Notebook form factor so you get a bigger screen as well as that high pixel
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density which means that you can do more on the PC now you do have that
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additional glare that comes with using a glass screen personally I love having
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glass in front of a panel that's my number one choice followed shortly by
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matte screens followed very distantly by
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shiny plastic screens um I think the glass adds a lot of Vibrance it adds
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crispness um personally I like it not everyone does I think it's fantastic and
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if I could upgrade my personal monitor to a glass screen monitor then I would
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love to but I'm waiting for someone to do a beautiful 30-in glass panel monitor
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which hasn't happened yet um okay so here we have a backlit keyboard as you
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can see this is a bilingual layout however if you were to buy this in the US then you would not see the bilingual
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layout as far as bilingual layouts go they haven't uh they haven't butchered
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it too badly sometimes you see bilingual layouts that make it impossible to hit
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anything but you know both your shift keys are somewhat intact the enter key I
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always like seeing the bigger Enter key but there's not a whole lot we can do about it it's Canadian law and such and
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I don't know what this does I wonder what this does okay you know what let's
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go into some of the other some of the other features here so um cool sense is
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kind of neat what cool sense does is it's basically a temperature controlled
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fan which isn't rocket science we've been seeing this on the PC side on the
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desktop for a long time but on a notebook what's kind of neat about it is
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that it keeps your pals from getting hot so that's the way that they've tuned it
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is so that as soon as the laptop starts to get hot enough that your palms would
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get that heat and sweatin Factor going on it kicks in the fan so that's kind of
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neat it also comes with two years of Norton Internet Security so whatever you
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may or may not think about Norton it comes with two years as opposed to like
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you know the stupid 30-day trial that insists upon being installed and you f
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it takes forever to remove it also comes with full copies of adobe Premier
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elements and Adobe Photoshop Elements which is like a compelling value ad
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because if you price those pieces of software out they are not cheap and they
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are significantly more functional than the ones that are included with Windows
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I mean what like paint and Windows Movie
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Maker like they're not even in the same kind
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of yeah whatever okay moving on we have
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DisplayPort out HDMI out Ethernet check
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that out fulls sizee RJ45 how Innovative
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a solution is that so they've managed to maintain a Slimmer than RJ45 form factor
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just using this little hinge right here to allow you to fit in your Ethernet
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port uh we've got uh oh they haven't
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colorcoded their USB 3 okay so this
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guy's usb3 this guy's USB 2 you can tell
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from how many pins are inside here's a microphone out SD card
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reader on the front we got a little Beats logo yes this is one of hp's Beats
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notebooks and I will explain more about that on the other side we have a mute
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button we have a volume switch so this
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is meant to be fine control um volume
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switch you you can see it actually spins an awful lot wow am I still spinning
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this yeah I'm still spinning it huh oh
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okay check it out there's a little animated thing on the screen it spins
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when I spin the dial cool nice little touches uh this is
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also another audio control button so what this guy does is you press the
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button and it comes up with a little uh hold on wait for it yes comes up with a
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little um you know thing that you could also access if you right clicked and
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went to playback devices and recording devices down in the system tray but here
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it is all in one nice little sort of menu for you uh We've also got our power
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in over here and that pretty much does it I mean you don't get a ton of IO on
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these uh super slim notebooks here we have our ventilation at the back as well
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as four rubber feet for the whole thing to sit on the battery is Big so this is
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to release the battery and uh we're we're not going to release the battery
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since we're running off battery right now but um we've also got speakers here at
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the front that's pretty much it
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see if we're missing anything so oh yeah it supports wiy it also supports
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wireless audio so with supported devices you can actually not just Bluetooth but
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with supported wireless headphone devices you can actually just stream
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directly to them
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um fulls size ports then bezel backlit
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keyboard oh yeah the keyboard detects your presence so I haven't actually
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tested this but in theory when you go
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away from it for a while and then you walk up to it the uh the backl actually
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actually turns on so that's that's just sort of one of those things that's kind
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of kind of neat ah yes the robust hinge so the difference between cheap
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notebooks I mean I I know we went over sort of the speeds and everything in
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this notebooks very briefly um however that's not necessarily all there is to
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it build quality is huge so not all notebooks you can take the hinge and go
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like this and not worry about something bad happening so between the SSD inside
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and the robust design of the hinge HP was very comfortable with me doing this
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demo on this notebook because build quality does mean something so the glass
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screen the robust hinge the keyboard that has almost no flex to it whatsoever
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that's one of the marks of the build quality of a notebook walk up to it in the store and go like this uh like this
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go like this go like this on the keyboard and see how much Flex there is
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to it if there's a lot of flex I guarantee you it's a cheap plastic Shell
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versus being a higher quality shell I think that pretty much covers it don't
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forget to subscribe to lonus Tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other
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computer videos and I hope you guys have enjoyed this one about the Beats andv
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Spectre now there is a spectre XT which is a lower-end model if you're buying a
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spectre I would definitely recommend going with this one cuz it comes with
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the scratch resistant gorilla glass as well as just being generally a very very
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Sleek looking little notebook slick wanted to show the battery and that was
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a good idea actually so we just uh trigger these take this off and here's
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the battery so uh HP quotes a 9h hour battery life on this uh on this model if
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I recall correctly and you can see why because the on the internals here look
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like look look at this see how the battery goes all the way down to the bottom almost half of the internals of
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this whole whole notebook are the battery so that's what keeps that Intel
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dual core running for such an extended period of time um in spite of the very
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very slim form factor