HP Envy Spectre XT Features

Three years ago, HP introduced the Envy 13. This week,reviewing its spiritual successor, the Envy Spectre XT. the Envy was accused of cribbing from Apple's MacBook playbook. Then, as now, it's a shiny silver machine, with an ultra-low-voltage processor, a single-button clickpad, no optical drive, few ports, and a 13-inch screen.
 the overall effect is clearly crafted to attract people who want a MacBook Air with Windows on board.

             
There aren't loads of ports on the Spectre XT, but for a machine that weighs just over three pounds and measures about half an inch thick, HP's actually provided a very generous array of connectivity. On the left side you'll find a full-size HDMI port, a USB 3.0 socket, and a bona fide Gigabit Ethernet jack that opens its spring-loaded metal jaws to accept a cable with a minimum of wasted space.
On the right, there's a USB 2.0 port that can charge gadgets when the laptop's off, a 3.5mm headset jack, and a full-size SD card slot that can actually hold the entire card inside the laptop's frame, as well as the power jack. We've seen some of these ideas in other recent ultrabooks, but taken as a whole, I'm hard-pressed to think of another machine this thin with this much connectivity. HP doesn't skimp on wireless either, by the way: Bluetooth 4.0 and an Intel Advanced-N 6235 solution for dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi (and WiDi, should you use the screen sharing technology) come standard. It is worth noting that the AC adapter's power plug doesn't mate well with the Spectre XT, and can get disconnected if you jolt it. The jack is clearly made for the deeper socket of a different laptop.


Since the very first HP Envy three years ago, the company has sought to provide Envy customers with displays a cut above. While one of those screens had some color issues and another one annoyingly ran out of stock, HP's generally offered brighter, more vibrant, high-resolution displays at a lower price than anyone else. Just a few months back, the Envy 14 Spectre's 1600 x 900 display was lovely. Here, you're stuck with a comparatively dim 1366 x 768 panel that loses brightness and threatens to invert or wash out your colors with the slightest change in viewing angle. It's not quite as bad as the display that comes with, say, the Dell XPS 13, and it’s bearable if you keep your head and the lid in a single position and don't move either one, but there are far better screens to be had in other laptops.
Speaker quality is almost always an afterthought in these thin notebooks, whether they have a fancy audio brand associated with them or not, but the sound that the Spectre XT produces isn't bad at all. The laptop has four drivers, two angled up towards the user in a speaker bar right beneath the screen, and two more pointed down in the curved sides of the chassis. Between those four drivers and some Beats Audio magic, the audio is reasonably full, and surprisingly loud for a laptop its size. It can't handle high highs or low lows, and layered combinations of instruments get lost, but anything which sounds like it was written specifically with the radio in mind sounds fairly good.
HP figured out how to build a good thin keyboard a while back, and the company actually improved on it here: despite the thinness of the Spectre XT, the keyboard is excellent. It's much like the one on the MacBook Air, in fact, with practically identical key size and spacing, a similar scissor-switch mechanism underneath each key, and a very similar cushiony feeling when I press down.
$999 buys you a fairly standard set of ultrabook specs. The entry-level Spectre XT comes with a dual-core 1.7GHz Core i5-3317U processor, 4GB of memory, 128GB of solid state storage and integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics. You can trade up to a 256GB SSD for an extra $200, or buy a smidgen of extra processor speed in $125 increments for a 1.9GHz Core i7-3517U, or a 2GHz Core i7-3667U instead. The larger SSD might make the most sense, since HP's recovery partition and system image take up a substantial chunk of space all by themselves, leaving only 69GB for your files on the 128GB model. Meanwhile, you can't expand the system memory at all: that 4GB of RAM is soldered to the motherboard.
It's not easy to balance temperature, fan volume and battery life in a chassis this thin, but the Spectre XT manages two out of three fairly well. Between the cool brushed aluminum palmrests and the insulated rubberized base, the Spectre XT always seems to fall in the comfortable range between warm and cool. Fan noise is always present, but not annoyingly so, and it's much preferable to the alternative.If style and sophistication are what you’re looking for in a Windows laptop, the $1,399 Envy 14 Spectre is still your best bet. If you want a workhorse, get a Lenovo ThinkPad X230 with a solid state drive, the premium IPS display, and a large battery instead.