HP Spectre X360 15.6 Laptop (2017)

The 2017 HP Spectre X360 15.6” is the successor of the 2016 Spectre X360 15 we reviewed. The laptop addresses the same high-end market of enthusiast and semi-pros, and offer similar high-level features: fast Intel CPU, 4K Display, Discrete graphics option. Let’s take a closer look.

Although family traits are recognizable, the new Spectre X360 has an improved design. The most obvious one being the thinner bezels as HP removed nearly 10mm on either side of the screen. If you go back to our 2016 Spectre X360 15 photos, you will see that the bezels were relatively big. HP has now addressed this.

The top and bottom bezels remain relatively thick, but HP points out a good reason: having the webcam at the top usually yields a better portrait shot during conference calls. Inversely, webcams located at the bottom, tend to have an odd angle – this is not new at all, but a tradeoff that each user (and OEM) must choose.

The 4K (3840x 160) display is powered by an NVIDIA GeForce 940MX discrete graphics processor (GPU) with 2GB VRAM. It is decent for video editing, and light gaming, but I wish that HP had the chance to integrate the newer NVIDIA GeForce 1040+ graphics chip instead. It would have been very nice.

We guess that the bottom contains the electronics and edge lighting for the display, and it’s also worth nothing that a certain size is required to fit with the overall form-factor of the chassis. Talking of which, the chassis design is a multi-mode one (Laptop, Tablet, Stand and Tent modes). Invented by Lenovo with the YOGA line, 360-degrees swivel laptops have now become almost a de-facto standard. It is extremely useful in various situations.

The backlit chiclet keyboard seems pretty standard for HP, and is quite agreeable to use. You may notice that the trackpad is absolutely huge, and probably one of the biggest we’ve seen – the size of a smartphone. That’s especially great if you are using a lot of touch gestures.

Inside, the fastest Intel CPU you can pick is the Core i7-7500U 2.5-3.5GHz Processor accompanied by 16GB of memory (2 DIMM / not user accessible) and up to 256GB of PCIe NVMe SSD storage.

As usual, the sound has been designed in partnership with Bang & Olufsen, with very nice speaker grills on either side of the keyboard. We haven’t had a chance to test them in a serene environment, but the previous version was quite good.

The HP Spectre X360 15.6 2017 weighs 4.43 Lbs, so it’s not really a feather-light laptop, but if you don’t need to lug it all the time, it is a very comfortable laptop to work on. Sometimes, it’s worth having such a laptop in your hotel room or temporary office, and use an 11” or a tablet during meetings.

Last, but not least, you get a very large 79.2 Whr battery in this laptop, which is charged with a 90W power adapter. We’re not sure how fast it charges, but many other laptops have a 45W charger, so we’ll try to see if there’s some true fast-charge in this one.

Ports

• 1x Thunderbolt 3 (Data up to 40Gb/s, Power Delivery, DisplayPort 1.2, HP Sleep and Charge)(41)
• 1x USB 3.1 Type-C™ Gen 1 (Data up to 5Gb/s, Power Delivery, DisplayPort 1.2, HP Sleep and Charge)(41)(42)
• 1x USB Type-A 3.1 Gen 1 (HP Sleep and Charge)
• 1x HDMI (full-size)
• 1x Headphone-out/microphone-in combo jack

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: General
Tags: CES, CES 2017, HP, Laptops