HP Spectre x360 16 : A big, beautiful convertible laptop

 

premium specter x360 convertible 

notebooks we were really wowed by its style and power and excellent keyboard so what if he took all of that goodness and just put it in a much bigger laptop that's basically what the company is offering with the new specter x 360 16. it's big it's beautiful and this time it comes equipped with Nvidia's RTX 3050 if you're looking for a notebook with a large screen that can flip into different orientations and has a decent amount of power for productivity work and some creative work this is a pretty compelling option now what's weird about this computer is that he doesn't really have much competition when it comes to big convertible pcs dell hasn't updated the XPS 15 two in one in several years LG has some larger convertibles but really those are about portability rather than power or anything like that it could just be that a lot of pc companies are just shying away from having heavy machines on the market especially heavy machines that you're going to be twisting and turning in several directions the x360 16 weighs 4.4 pounds which is a lot more than the three-pound 14-inch version of this laptop it's not too far off from the 4.3-pound MacBook pro 16. and honestly i figure if you want a big laptop you assume it's going to be a little heavier than some of the ultra is out there and at the very least it's not as heavy as dell's xps 17 which can go all the way up to 5.5 pounds depending on what you configure it with design wise the spectre x360 looks a lot more glam than the dell xps line which tends to be more minimalist both companies rely on all metal cases they feel very premium but hp just goes a little further to make it look more like jewelry there are these nice metal accents around the edges even along the hinges there's a little bit of metal in there just the overall look of it really screams style it screams you know pay attention to me compared to what dell's doing which just tends to be a lot more laid back and to be honest hp is really scaling back the sort of bejeweled look it was going for before with the spectrex 360 line it's a lot more understated now it's uh little things that make it look really cool i like the way the edges of the computer kind of round off some of the corners especially like below the screen are cut off a bit too which give it a nice really interesting style like many 16-inch notebooks we've seen recently the x360 is actually replacing a 15-inch model hp was able to fit in a bigger screen by shaving off more of the bezels and also going for a 16x10 display that's a little taller than the old 16x9 screen that results in a screen that's 22 millimeters taller with 11 more vertical viewing area according to hp our review model featured a 4k plus oled monitor that really just looked beautiful no matter what i was looking at though i'm just a sucker for oled's deep blacks and eye popping colors there are also 3k plus led screens available if you don't want to pay a premium for oled as great as the screen is it's a little unfortunate that it doesn't have hdr or dolby vision like the xps line and there's no fast refresh rate screen like microsoft including the new laptop studio and i think for some shoppers that alone may be a deal breaker you know having hdr is really great if you're streaming a lot of video and you want those colors to pop a little more and having a fast refresh rate screen is just really useful for smoothing and just doing about anything you know scrolling the internet looks so much nicer when the screen refreshes faster but i'd say if you're upgrading from an older laptop you probably won't mind not having those features this screen is still going to look a lot better than something four or five years old hp's convertible hinge makes it easy to open up the x360 16 with just one hand that's something i like in any laptop and it doesn't take much effort to fold it into a tent formation by pushing the screen all the way back that's useful if you just want to like lay it on your lap if you're on the couch or in bed or something you can also flip the keyboard to the bottom and kind of just have it hold up the screen to you i found that really useful if i'm on the couch or i'm on a couch that has a nearby table that's a great way to put the screen in front of you and then you can just use the touchscreen it's super convenient unfortunately, i didn't find the x360s tablet mode to be that useful now this is always a problem with the convertible the laptop you know if you turn a three pound laptop into a tablet that's still going to be tough to use but this is even bigger and I found this just super hard to hold for a very long time even if I was using two hands it's just kind of a joke, it looks ridiculous and maybe in some cases, you'd use this but I think this laptop is more appealing to people who want to use different orientations not necessarily the tablet mode and that's fine you know you can get a tablet pretty easily I think for most people having a bigger screen is just going to be the more useful feature on this laptop so I don't mind giving up the tablet mode at all just makes it more useful for watching videos or doing some work and speaking of work typing up this review on the x360 just made me fall in love with hp's full-size keyboards all over again they have a decent amount of key travel there's a lot of room for me to spread my fingers out it just feels super inviting it's like a concert piano that's just begging to be played my only complaint is that the keyboard is a little non-standard for some reason, hp included a fingerprint sensor in the lower right hand corner where the control key normally should be so that's there that's not on the power button like it is on most of their laptops and they're also just some specialized control buttons that uh you'll have to learn some function buttons you'll have to learn where those are just paid really close attention to those icons on the plus side the touchpad is significantly larger than before and it's still super smooth and accurate to use we reviewed the top-end two thousand and thirty dollar configuration you get an intel core i7 eleven three ninety-eight processor, unfortunately, there's no 12th gen support yet 16 gigabytes of ram nvidia's rtx 3050 gpu and a one terabyte nvme ssd with 32 gigabytes of intel optane memory the x360 had no trouble with basic productivity tasks that are not a huge surprise gave that hardware and I appreciated just how peppy it made windows 11 feel it opened apps up swiftly and it didn't show any signs of slow down as I piled on more and more browser tabs when it comes to general benchmarks the x36016 performs similarly to last year's surface laptop 4 and the asus zenbook duo I expected it a lot better though because this has a more powerful gpu there should be better performance in there somewhere that rtx 3050 gpu is nvidia's lowest end offering you know in the rtx line but that's still a big upgrade over intel's xc graphics I found it really capable for playing 1080p games as well so something like halo infinite or boomerang x performed really smoothly and you know that's a nice thing to have especially in a productivity laptop, i'd say the x360 is a good option if you just want to play some games once in a while maybe on a work trip where you don't want to lug over a gaming laptop too big screens come with huge energy demands so i wasn't too surprised when the x360 only lasted 10 hours and 55 minutes during our battery test hp claims it'll go up to 17 hours with mixed use performance but it's unclear how they tested that our benchmark relies on looping hd video so that's not exactly stressful i wouldn't expect a 16-inch notebook to easily reach the 15 hours of battery a life that we've seen on smaller machines though it's a bit disappointing you know what the x360 still offers enough juice to power you through a workday it just doesn't have as much as we see in some other ultra portables being flexible in more ways than one is really one of the big selling points for any convertible and I think the x360 16 succeeds in that regard I found it to be really great when I'm just lounging on the couch or if I was sitting in bed and watching netflix or something and given just how important video calls are these days the x360 16 is really well equipped with a 5 megapixel camera along with some software features to you know beautify your face or focus on you if you're moving around in different locations of the screen it's a much the nicer camera than the 720p options we've seen on a lot of hp's and other laptops so that's a nice thing to have you know it's nice to see cameras moving forward especially as we're relying so much on zoom and other platforms there are also some nice privacy conscious features too you can physically block the camera by hitting a button on the keyboard a little black and the white thing just pops up over the camera lens and you can also disable the microphone as well and you get a little pop-up when that happens too I hope to see this on more laptops i just find it really useful especially when there are so many things to be paranoid about these days unlike many other style focused laptops hp also includes a wealth of ports on the x360 you've got two usbc connections one usb 3.0 type a connection that's on a nifty little latch hp has been using that for a while there's full-size hdmi there's a micro sd card slot and yes there is still a headphone jack it's really nice to see that hp isn't giving up on that like dell is with the new xps 13 plus as much as I love our review models oled screen the better x360 16 deal is the led equipped 1700 model with the same cpu ram and rtx 3050 gpu it has a smaller 512-gigabyte ssd but you can always upgrade that down the line if you're less concerned about gaming performance the entry level 1500 model drops the rtx 3050 for intel's xe graphics as the only big screen convertible game in town hp could have easily phoned in the specter x360 16. instead, it's given us a computer that can do a bit of gaming handle all the zoom calls you to need and look good while

Please comment