The Best-Smelling Laptop of all Time. - HP Spectre Folio
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,969 words · ~9 min read
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when i first heard hp was making a laptop wrapped in leather
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i knew we had to get one if for no reason other than to poke fun of people
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with more money than brains but once i found out about its heaps of
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battery life gigabit lte connectivity and
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super interesting hinge design
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i started to come around to the notion that the spectre folio might be more
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than just a pretty face we could be looking at right now
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a serious contender against the macbook air and the surface laptop
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forward slash LTT
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there are two things you're going to after you figure out the stupid pending
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there are two things you're going to immediately notice about the spectre
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folio first that it's covered in leather and
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second the leather smells really good
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it's actually kind of amazing how much a scent can change
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our perceptions like pulling this machine out of your bag there's like
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this this feeling of uh for me anyway of
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like readiness like the the closest analogs that i have are pulling on my
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riding gloves and kind of stretching them out a little bit
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or cinching up a horse saddle ready to
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mount like it's just it's kind of crazy and it also feels
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great to hold with its nicely rounded spine it just feels
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professional but once opened up my feelings about the
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spectre folio do get a touch more complicated
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so the way that the leather wraps around the screen creates this kind of weird
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looking double bezel i i
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really wish they could have had the leather end right at the edge of the
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display and overall i think given another generation they can probably
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improve the way that the metal components transition to the leather
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ones and then there's this pen holder
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frankly speaking it's stupid like could they not figure
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out any better way to secure this to the
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side of the display honestly i would rather they had just done nothing i'd
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rather they say wear a shirt with a pocket in the front and put it there
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because other than that the overall feel of the machine
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is very solid there's virtually no flex
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to this thing and i trust hp when they say that the leather is not going to
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wear quickly like this is really nice it's the same kind of stuff you might
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find in say a mercedes now io is pretty
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bare bones-ish but overall the three usb-c ports two of which are Thunderbolt
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3 all of which can be used for charging give you a lot of flexibility to connect
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other devices to the folio provided you're willing to carry a dongle or two
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and a headphone jack is thankfully present
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now the display comes in both 1080p and 4k varieties ours rocks the 1080p one
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and given the screen size i really don't see any need to go higher than that and
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thankfully hp has provided the option to
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have touchscreen on either resolution
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good work you guys a problem with the display though is
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that it feels like there is a lot of wasted vertical real estate here like
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going from a surface laptop or a 2018 macbook air to the folio is gonna be
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jarring and it's made that much worse by this massive chin bar hanging out here
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that would in a perfect world just be more display for a 16 by 10 aspect ratio
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it is nice to see a fairly good webcam implementation though and the inclusion
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of Windows hello facial recognition is a huge plus overall the display still gets
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an a for its excellent brightness colors and touch support which goes well of
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course with the convertible nature of the spectre folio this is quite
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possibly its strongest point like this is a really smart two-in-one laptop
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design it's got these nice strong magnets so you can still operate it like
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a normal laptop but put a little bit of pressure like this and
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boom moving from one mode to the other is very simple and the ever so slight
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incline when it's in tablet mode allows the included pen to be used very
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comfortably again though i really hate the way it secures to the device but
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the writing experience is solid comparable to that of the surface pro
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even if it doesn't quite keep up with the near instantaneous responsiveness of
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the ipad pro now you do carry around
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more bulk than the surface pro but
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i mean i think that's a trade-off a lot of people would be willing to make for
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the ability to use the folio on their lap without it kind of falling off and
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it's really nice that unlike some two-in-ones the keyboard is not going to
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end up getting scratched up in tablet mode so it just looks kind of ratty and
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gross after a short while the speakers are pretty good with
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excellent clarity making them great for hearing dialogue like NVIDIA calls
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obviously very business oriented products but as you might expect they do
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lack bass and their grill takes up a lot
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of space at the top of the notebook that i just i really wish could have been
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used to move up the keyboard and make space for a bigger trackpad
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look at this poor thing actually we should talk about the
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keyboard first um here's what i can say about that that's positive
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if you finger pack or you type pretty heavily you might actually really like
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it the travel and the tactile feedback are both solid
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but for both me and alex and we do often
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disagree about these things the stiffness of the key switches and
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some noticeable inconsistency in their key stabilization made it really
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difficult to get into a groove and maintain our top typing speeds that's a
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shame now the experience will be better if you have smaller hands since your
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palms will sit on this delightful leather palm rest instead of on the edge
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of the device but when you compare it to the comfort of the surface laptop and
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the macbook air it just doesn't quite hold up and then coming back to the
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track pad well it's also kind of meh there's slightly
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more force required to click it than i'd like and this completely rules out
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alex's thumb padding technique while he's typing and it's out of the box
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acceleration curve is weird at best it kind of seems like they're compensating
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for something you know what i'm talking about no like literally it seems like they're
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compensating for the small size of the touchpad to make sure you can actually
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get all the way across the screen overall it gets i don't know c plus so
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that was the pretty bad stuff but there are more good things lte support
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means that you can be productive from basically anywhere like it baffles me
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that features that we take for granted on couple hundred dollar smartphones
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like sim slots and decent cameras have
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taken so long to take off in ultrabooks
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maybe this is changing though so a device like this along with cheaper data
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will make it so that you don't have to worry about things like airport hotel or
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coffee shop wi-fi and all the security concerns that go along with them and
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this feature is perfectly complemented by the spectre folio's incredible
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battery life the shocking
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54.3 watt hour battery in this thing
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complemented by a low power processor and one watt display means that you can
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expect lg ground levels of freedom with the folio even if it is a touch heavier
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and the low power processor brings other benefits the spectre folio is completely
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passively cooled and comes with a built-in coffee break feature that is to
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say that in short tasks the dual core core i7 is pretty snappy but if you ask
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this thing to do anything even remotely resembling heavy lifting like even just
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installing a program you might find that you've got a minute to run over to the
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break room and see if anyone brought in snacks today okay yeah i was being
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facetious there that's not really a feature um and honestly this was kind of
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a confusing thing about this device to me because
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on hp's reviewer's guide the number one
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pain point that hp identified for millennials was performance
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but then that's where they ended up making the spectorfolio's biggest
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sacrifice well i mean other than the cow that they slaughtered in order to
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manufacture it the dual core processor makes it
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noticeably slower while performing tasks like basic video editing working on
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small cad files and doing more serious photo work and this wouldn't be a
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problem except that basically every other ultrabook on the market
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with the notable exception of the macbook air has twice the core count at
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least as an available option and with the spectre folio coming in at about the
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same price as the surface laptop that
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makes it tough to recommend it gets some things really right like
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the hinge design the battery life and mobile internet and it really does feel
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good but it gets enough things wrong but i
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find myself intrigued to see where they'll go with the next one
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rather than ready to pull the trigger today
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it does feel good though
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