HP Spectre x360 14 Laptop Review: 2-in-1 form factor meets solid performance, blessed by AI

Pros
- Great performance considering its form factor
- Bunch of practical and useful AI features
- Solid, premium built despite 2-in-1 form factor
- One of the best webcams on a laptop
- Stunning, 2.8K 120Hz OLED display
- Solid speaker setup
- Impressive keyboard and trackpad

Cons
- Sparse port selection
- Is a tad bit expensive

Price: Rs 1,70,000 for the tested variant
Rating: 4.5/5

The 2-in-1 form factor is a great upgrade over your regular laptops and notebooks. The sheer convenience of switching between a fully functioning laptop and a pretty sizable tablet at a flip, without compromising on performance, is somewhat addictive.

However, they usually have some issues. Most of the time, the construction of the laptop can be a bit chintzy, and honestly, not all laptop manufacturers do a good job with the software.

Not HP though. They have been making the HP Spectre x360 for years now. In fact, one of the first products that I reviewed was a Spectre X360 from late 2017- early 201d, boy have they stood out all these years.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the 2-in-1 form factor, options from most laptop makers involve some trade-off or the other. Usually, it involves sacrificing some performance and, at times, compromising on battery life. The HP Spectre X360 has time and time again, been an exception to this rule.

What I am trying to say is, that for all these years, if you wanted to go for a 2-in-1 laptop, the Spectre X360 was the one to go for. They weren’t always perfect, and there certainly were times when they were outdone by their competitors. However, they are always solid. You couldn’t go wrong with the Spectre x360.

So, does the 2024 version, the Spectre x360 14 still hold up? Is the Spectre x360 14 still, the king of the hill as far as premium 2-in-1 laptops are concerned?

HP Spectre x360 14 Laptop Review: Design and build quality
Let’s get one thing straight right from the beginning — the HP Spectre x360 14 is one of the most premium-looking Windows laptops in the market right now.

You get an all-aluminium build that has a matte finish. You get two colour options — one Nightfall Black with some brass accents and the other, our test unit, Slate Blue with sky blue accents. What really sets the Spectre x360 14 apart is the rather diamond-cut design of the chassis. Instead of a regular rectangular laptop, this one here, is a hexagonal in shape, albeit, just so slightly.

Because of the shape of the laptop and the colour of the accents, what you have here is a laptop that genuinely stands out in a board room or wherever you are.

Then, there’s the hinge on the x360. Again, it’s very solid and feels robust. I never encountered any issues with it feeling too loose or too stiff when transitioning between its different orientations. Also, even when you set it up as a tent, with the display hanging in the air, the hinges hold the display’s weight fairly well.

We really like the laptop’s clean and minimalist design. However, despite the laptop’s matte finish, it does attract some fingerprints, which are especially easier to see because of the dark colour.

The lid also has tonnes of magnets that come in very handy when you’re trying to stow away the included stylus. Just pop it on the cover of the lid practically anywhere towards the edges, and you’re good to go.

And because the entire chassis is made out of aluminium, there’s no flex or bending of any sorts whatsoever. As for weight, it just tips the scale at over 1.55kgs. Saying that the Spectre x360 14 is built like a tank would be a gross understatement.

As for connectivity options, the HP Spectre x360 14 packs a fair. You get a USB Type-A port rated at 10Gbps, two USB Type-C Thunderbolt 4 ports with USB PD and DisplayPort 1.4, and a 3.5mm jack. While the array of ports may feel a bit sparse, especially for a laptop that costs as much as the Spectre x360, HP takes care of it by providing a Type-C dongle in the box, offering additional ports.

HP Spectre x360 14 Laptop Review: Display
One of the first things that you will notice about the Spectre x360 14 when you start using it will be its display, and it looks gorgeous. You get a 14-inch 2.8K (​​2880 x 1800 resolution) OLED panel that is set in the now standard 16:10 aspect ratio. It has a refresh rate of 48-120Hz that auto adjusts based on what you’re doing, and a response time of 0.2 ms.

The display covers 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut, and it supports HDR at 500 and SDR at 400 nits. You also get a bunch of other features — UWVA, edge-to-edge glass, micro-edge coating, anti-reflection coating, Corning Gorilla Glass NBTTM, Low Blue Light certification — the lot. And of course, you are getting a multi-touch panel that supports pen input.

The end result is, that you have a display that is simply marvellous, not matter what you do. Because this is an OLED panel, you get great colour contrast and deep crushing blacks which makes watching content, or even creating content a joy. The display also offers excellent viewing angles, courtesy of it being an OLED panel. Images on the screen appear vibrant, sharp, and true to colour. Also, when you play indie games that are actually properly calibrated, like Stray, you are most likely going to have the time of your life.

No matter what you do, colours are lively and vivid; they simply pop out of the screen. Seriously, consuming content is a joy on this thing. The laptop is also IMAX Enhanced certified, so certain shows and movies on Disney look phenomenal.

HP Spectre x360 14 Laptop Review: Keyboard and trackpad
HP’s premium notebooks usually have one of the best keyboards you will find on a laptop. The Spectre x360 14, is no different. The keys have a very tactile feedback which makes typing on the machine very comfortable and pleasurable.

Most of the keycaps are pretty sizeable and have very clear legends, barring the up and down arrow keys, which, for some reason, feel a bit weird to use. You also get two two levels of backlighting for better visibility, but do note, they are a solid white, and cannot be tweaked.

The keyboard also houses the power button, which has an in-built fingerprint reader for your biometrics.

As for the trackpad, you get a pretty massive haptic trackpad, almost like the ones that you get in MacBooks, and that’s saying something. Its positioned right in the centre and has no markings or buttons. Despite that, it is a joy to use, especially when you’re playing around with the gestures.

The trackpad uses a glass cover with a protective film, so is very easy to use and has smooth and consistent tracking. It also has great palm rejection. It feels very responsive and supports a ton of gestures as well. The haptic motor especially really stands out.

HP Spectre x360 14 Laptop Review: Webcam and speakers
The one area where the HP Spectre x360 14 really stands out is its camera. We get a 9MP (technically, an 8.3MP for photos) HP Wide Vision 4K camera with IR. You don’t get a physical camera shutter, but it can be disabled electronically using the F2 key.

Although not as good as a premium flagship smartphone, the camera in the Spectre x360 is fantastic. You can take photos at 8.3MP (3840X2160) resolution and record videos at up to 2560X1440 at 30 fps. And, thanks to the integrated IR, you also have support for Windows Hello. As for the colours and image quality, I am all praises for them, they are great.

For video calls and online meetings, you also integrated dual array digital microphones.

There is a very good reason as to why HP had to upgrade its camera. You see, the new series of Intel CPUs have a ton of AI processing power integrated into them thanks to the new NPU. Moreover, Windows is also emphasising a lot on their AI features like Windows Studio Effect.

You get features like auto frame, which basically lets the camera pan around digitally to follow an object, a wide array of realistic-looking blur effects and my personal favourite, an eye contect feature that basically generates videos and photos of you facing the camera, even when you look away. You also get support for features like temporal noise reduction.

Coming to the audio set-up, you don’t get to see Bang & Olufsen here, as we have come to expect from HP. Instead, we see HP using their in-house Poly Studio audio setup. And boy, did they bring something special.

The Spectre x360 14 is, by far, are one of the best-sounding Windows laptops that I have tested. They are almost as good as the 14-inch MacBook Pro — almost.

It is a quad-speaker set-up. You get two speaker grills on either sides of the keyboard that are toward facing, as well as some speakers under the laptop that are facing forward. The sound out of the laptop is clear, and punchy, with pretty good bass. Songs like Mary on a Cross by Ghost as well as Lemonade by Diljit Dosanjh sound phenomenal.

You also get support for DTS Headphone:X in case you have a supported pair of headphones. All in all, we were pretty impressed by the audio set up that Spectre x360 packs.

HP Spectre x360 14 Laptop Review: Performance
Under the hood, the HP Spectre x360 14 packs Intel’s new Core Ultra 7 155H CPU, which packs a total of 16 cores, 6 Performance cores and 8 Efficient cores. You also get an additional 2 Low Power Efficient cores, for a total of 22 threads. The CPU boosts to up to 4.8GHz. Our test unit came with 32GB of DDR5 RAM, running at 7467MHz. For storage, we had 1 TB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD.

In real life, day-to-day performance, there is practically nothing that the new Spectre x360 14 can’t handle. You won’t be setting any performance records, but not once during our testing period did we go “I wish this had more power.”

Even in benchmarks, it does a fairly good job. One might expect higher numbers for a notebook that costs as much as the Spectre x360 does, but considering its form factor and the fact that it manages its heat out so well, is pretty solid. And even though the notebook, comes with an integrated Intel Arc GPU, instead of a standalone, dedicated GPU, it does fairly well in GPU benchmarks as well. Intel’s new Core Ultra line of processors also comes with an onboard NPU or Neural Processing Unit, so it handles on-device AI tasks pretty well.

We had no issues whatsoever when we put the Spectre x360 through the paces. It handled a ridiculous number of Chrome tabs (36 to be exact) just as well as we could hope, and it was pretty smooth when scrubbing through a slightly edited 4K clip on Premiere Pro.

As for upgradability, the HP Spectre x360 14 presents a mixed bag. While the laptop has user-upgradable storage, the LPDDR5X memory modules are soldered onto the motherboard.

For wireless connectivity, you get Bluetooth 5.4, and the latest Intel Wi-Fi 7 card.

Coming to heat management, under very heavy workloads, the laptop does experience some marginal heating but not to a level that would be disconcerting in anyway. That’s largely in part because of how efficient the new Core Ultra processors from Intel are. During our tests, the maximum surface temperature that we recorded was around 45-46 degrees that too during some really hard-hitting benchmarks which, is perfectly reasonable

HP Spectre x360 14 Laptop Review: Battery
The Spectre x360 14 comes with a 66Wh 4-cell battery. The battery life on the Yoga 9i is again, very impressive. In day-to-day usage that involved a lot of browsing, watching videos, writing, and editing photos, the laptop would easily last me well over 9-10 hours, with about 15 per cent justice still left in the tank.

As for benchmarks, it scored a pretty solid 12-and-a-half hours of battery backup in the PC Mark 10 Modern Office battery benchmark. Another great thing about the Spectre x360 is that it comes with a 65W charger so even if you somehow manage to drain it completely, you can get back and running in a jiffy.

HP Spectre x360 14 Laptop Review: Verdict
The HP Spectre x360 is one cracker of a notebook that comes with a stunning 2.8K display, a great battery life, solid performance backed by Intel’s new Core Ultra processors and a bunch of quality-of-life features that make using the laptop, great fun. It really sets the tone for what a convertible, 2-in-1 laptop should be.

Then there is the design and the build quality. It is simply gorgeous, especially when you touch and feel it. We also get a great keyboard and a pretty solid trackpad. The only serious downside I can think of, is the lack of ports, but then HP does throw in a dongle of sorts that has some extra ports.

Is it too expensive? Well, it certainly is pricey, but I wouldn’t call it overpriced. The tonnes of lifestyle features that you get and the overall quality of the laptop more than make-up for any premium that HP might be charging for it.

All things considered, if you have the budget and you’re looking for a premium 2-in-1 laptop that has the grunt to go toe-to-toe with a more serious, performance-oriented notebook, the HP Spectre x360 14 is an obvious choice. It certainly wins our stamp of approval.