When HP announced the new Spectre Folio last October, it caused a stir. HP has been steadily providing some of the most stylish and exciting laptops on the market over the last couple of years, but the Spectre Folio takes the styling in an entirely new direction. For the first time ever, HP chose leather as a material for the entire laptop’s exterior. The Folio also offers a somewhat unique take on the convertible as well, with a display that pivots to lie on top of the keyboard, and this, combined with the leather exterior, means HP’s Spectre Folio stands apart from all other PCs on the market today.

Laptops have been primarily plastic or metal for decades. Plastic is cheaper, easy to mould, and durable. Metal offers better heat transfer, looks great, and generally feels great in the hand. Leather offers a different take. It’s soft in the hand. It tends to be very durable, and over time can develop a nice patina, and although you may feel it’s going to be less durable than a metal laptop, in reality any nicks and dings in the leather will likely blend in, whereas on metal they tend to stand out. Plus, it can be dyed various colors, and HP offers both a Cognac Brown and Bordeaux Burgundy color, both of which look amazing.

HP built the Spectre Folio to be fanless as well, which means they’ve chosen Intel’s Y series of Core processors. Although these are the latest generation Core i5-8200Y or Core i7-8500Y, the 5-Watt TDP limits them to two cores and four threads, both of which are half of a typical U series 15-Watt processor found in most notebooks of this size. A mobile workstation this is not, and we’ll dig into the performance later in the review. The laptop also ships with 8 or 16 GB of LPDDR3, and of course Intel’s UHD 615 graphics. If you need lots of storage, HP ships with up to 2 TB of NVMe SSD, although you’ll pay for that privilege.

HP Spectre Folio Model Reviewed: Core i7 / 8 GB / 256 GB
	Core i5	Core i7
CPU	Intel Core i5-8200Y 1.3-3.9 GHz 5W TDP	Intel Core i7-8500Y 1.5-4.2 GHz 5W TDP
RAM	8 to 16 GB LPDDR3-1866
Storage	256GB to 2TB NVMe SSD
Display	13.3" 1920x1080 IPS Corning Gorilla Glass 4 3840x2160 IPS Optional
Wireless	Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8265 802.11ac Wi-Fi Intel XMM 7560 LTE Advanced Pro optional
Audio	Bang & Olufsen quad-speakers
Keyboard	Full-size backlit
I/O	2 x Thunderbolt 3 1 x USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C 1 USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A (via included dongle) Headset jack
Battery	54.28-Wh battery 65-Watt AC Adapter
Dimensions	12.6 x 9.23 x 0.60 inches
Weight	3.28 lbs
Ships with	Digital Pen USB-C to A dongle
Prices	$1299.99 and up

The 13.3-inch notebook offers impressive expansion though, with two Thunderbolt 3 ports offering 40 Gb/s transfer rates, and a third USB Type-C port as well. It feels like we’re at a point where moving completely to USB Type-C is not the burden it once was, but HP also ships the notebook with a Type-C to Type-A adapter for accessing older devices.

For all-day connectivity, HP offers the Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8265 network adapter, which is one of the best on the market. In fact it’s likely only surpassed by the Intel 9260. HP also offers LTE integrated into the laptop with the Intel XMM 7560 modem. Pair those with the 55 Wh battery, and you’ve got a true all-day anywhere device.

HP also includes a stylus in the box, along with a pen holder you can stick on the laptop. It offers Windows Hello IR facial recognition, and Bang & Olufsen speakers. This is all excellent, but really, the key to this laptop is the leather design.

Design

With a name like Folio, it shouldn’t be surprising to hear that the HP Spectre Folio is the one notebook computer that feels the most like you’re carrying a notebook. The chrome-tanned leather offers an incredible in-hand feel for this laptop, but also feels like it’s going to be very durable. This isn’t the leather of a belt, but more like well-made furniture, with the feeling that it’s going to last for years.

HP offers both the Cognac Brown color of our review unit, as well as a Bordeaux Burgundy, but the styling is far more different than the exterior color.  The brown unit ships with a black keyboard and accents, but the burgundy model switches the keyboard deck to silver giving the laptop some incredible contrast.

The attention to detail on the Spectre Folio is impressive. There’s a wonderful stitching on the back of the laptop where the display folds, and under that is a subtle HP logo in the leather itself. The underside consists of the same leather as the rest of the notebook, with a slightly raised foot at the back to give it some stability. Another great touch is when you fold the display back and can see images of the four ways this convertible laptop can be used. That area is likely to be seen very little, since it’s hidden in any use mode, but it’s a great design element to add beautiful imagery there. Opening the laptop up takes some pressure, but the natural gap at the front of the closed laptop where the two leather edges meet makes this a very simple process.

Once it is open, you can see the display, flanked by leather edging. The keyboard deck is also wrapped in leather, meaning if you decided to rest your wrists on the keyboard deck, they get to enjoy the experience. HP has done a wonderful job tone-matching the trackpad as well, so it looks like a truly integrated piece of the design.

Although the design is unique, one area that could be better is the display itself. Although the side bezels are thin and somewhat blend in with the leather exterior, the top bezel is somewhat wide. In its defense, it does house the webcam and IR cameras in the correct location, so that is forgiven. The bottom, however, features a large chin. HP has gone with a 16:9 display aspect ratio, but being a true convertible notebook, this extra space would have suited a 3:2 display so well, and offered better usability in the tablet mode. We’re slowly seeing some 3:2 offerings on the market, but not quickly enough to make this reviewer happy.

HP’s keyboard is light on key travel, but the keys still feel solid. It’s always a compromise on a notebook that aims to be thin, but this one strikes a good balance and is easy to adjust to. The keyboard deck also stretches very close to the edges, and HP offers some extra navigation keys on the right. The keys also offer a couple levels of backlighting with white LEDs.

Subtly tucked up in the top left corner of the keyboard deck is the power button. It’s nice that it’s not a key in the keyboard like some laptops offer, but being a convertible, there’s no real way to power the laptop on if it’s in tablet mode. It’s a bit strange that you have to open the laptop up to turn it on, which is why most convertibles offer a power button on the side.

The trackpad is excellent, offering an incredibly smooth surface, although it is a bit smaller than you may be used to. HP’s Spectre x360, as an example, offers a trackpad that is 37% wider and 14% taller. But, despite the small size, it does work well. If you need to augment your input, you can use both touch, or the included stylus. Unfortunately, the review unit didn’t come with the stylus so I can’t compare it to a Surface Pen or Apple Pencil at this time.

One of the most unique aspects of the Spectre Folio is how it changes from a laptop to a tablet, and the various states in-between. Generally, convertibles tend to fall into two categories. Either it’s a detachable display, or a keyboard that flips around. HP has followed in the footsteps of Acer’s Aspire R13 design from 2015 where the display flips up and then can be set on top of the keys. Unlike Acer which used a U-Frame though, HP’s hinge mechanism is across the back of laptop in the middle and runs the entire width of the display.

It’s a unique take that offers some advantages over the style that Lenovo brought to the mainstream with the Yoga. The main one being that the keyboard is never on the bottom, so you’d never have to set the keyboard on anything, or hold the keyboard like you would with a Yoga-style laptop in tablet mode. It also brings the benefit of being able to use the notebook in an easel mode where you’d still have access to the trackpad if required.

HP uses strong magnets to hold the display in place in both the notebook mode and the easel mode, which means when using the laptop with touch or stylus with the display tipped forward, it’s very sturdy offering no movement at all.

The disadvantage over a Yoga-style 360° laptop is that switching from one mode to another is a bit more finicky than just rotating the laptop, and the hinge perhaps somewhat accounts for the added weight for the Spectre Folio, which tips the scales at 1.49 kg / 3.28 lbs. That doesn’t sound that heavy, but it’s almost half a pound heavier than a 13-inch HP Spectre x360.

Overall, the design is unique, and sets the Spectre Folio apart from every other laptop on the market today. The leather works really well as an external material, offering a great in-hand feel, and it’s a material that should hide any scuffs or nicks a bit better than aluminum would. The different take on the convertible also offers some benefits, and provides an incredibly solid foundation especially in the easel mode.

System Performance

Although there’s not been a big architectural change in Intel’s laptop computing platform since Skylake launched in 2015, the big jump lately was when Intel doubled the core count of its U series processors to four cores and eight threads with Kaby Lake Refresh. But, Intel’s Y series of processors, which are their low-power offerings, stick with the dual-core design with Amber Lake. HP offers two processor options on the Spectre Folio, with the base model starting with the Intel Core i5-8200Y, and the top-tier offering being the Core i7-8500Y.

The Y series offers a nominal 5-Watt TDP, which is 1/3 of the power envelope offered in a U-Series processor, so it’s no surprise that it can’t offer more cores yet. The Core i5-8200Y features a 1.3 GHz base frequency, and 3.9 GHz maximum turbo frequency. The Core i7-8500Y bumps the frequency to 1.5 GHz base, and 4.2 GHz Turbo. Although the processors are only 5-Watt TDPs, they compare favorably to the U series in terms of maximum frequency. For example, a Core i5-8265U has the same 3.9 GHz maximum turbo as the i5 Y series, and the i7-8500Y even exceeds that. The major difference though will be on how long each processor can maintain that frequency, but on short workloads that are not highly multithreaded, the Y series should perform fairly well, while still offering the advantage of a fanless design.

On the low-TDP processors, the manufacturer has even more of an impact on overall system performance, since the laptop materials, cooling, and design play a bit part in how the processor dissipates heat. We analyzed this in-depth back when Intel first launched Core M back in 2015, so it’ll be curious to see how the latest Y series compares in a leather-bound laptop.

To see how the HP Spectre Folio performs, we’ve run it through our laptop workflow and will be comparing it to other recent notebooks in this category.

PCMark

UL’s PCMark 10 is an overall system test, with different workloads that stress the CPU, GPU, and storage, using real workloads for office tasks, rendering, browsing, and app start-up time. Essentials, which includes web browsing and video conferencing sees the Amber Lake powered Spectre Folio at the bottom, but Productivity, which features office tasks shows that the high boost frequency of the Core i7-8500Y helps to keep the Folio competitive. Digital Content Creation which does photo editing, rendering, and other media work is unsurprisingly a challenge for this notebook.

Cinebench

As we are filling out our Cinebench R20 results, we’ll still focus on R15 for the time being. Cinebench offers both single-threaded and multi-threaded tests, and the rendering benchmark is purely a CPU task, so it’s a nice way to easily look at the pure CPU performance. This is a long test, so the 5-Watt TDP certainly comes into play heavily here for the Folio, although it’s still competitive with just one thread active. On multi-threaded though, all of the other laptops offer twice as many cores and threads and really show the difference between Y and U series performance.

x264

The x264 benchmark  is also a CPU test, but it’s over a much longer time period so it helps differentiate devices that may struggle with cooling. The Spectre Folio doesn’t struggle with cooling, but the 5-Watt TDP and low thread count doesn’t do it any favors here.

Web

Web is an important metric because it’s one of the primary functions for any computer, but it’s also one of the least accurate tests due to how much the scripting engine in the browser influences performance, and performance will change over time as the browser gets updated. Sometimes performance goes up, but not always. But, it is an almost ideal scenario for the Y series processors, since the web workloads tend to be short bursts of work followed by periods of inactivity, so the high boost frequency of the Core i7-8500Y should be utilized more in these tests.

As you can see, the Y series isn’t as big of a hindrance here, offering good performance in all of the web tests. These results were obtained with Microsoft Edge, and we’ll be moving to the Chromium based Edge for these results soon. Once we move, we’ll add in some new, more up-to-date scripting tests.

Comparisons to Core M

Intel launched Core M in 2015, which was their first attempt at the 5-Watt range in the Core lineup. Previous to Core M, the Y series had a much higher TDP and still required a fan, so it was rarely used, but by shrinking the TDP even further, there was now a solid reason to implement these Y series CPUs: fanless computing.

Core M has had its detractors, and Intel ditched the branding a couple of years ago, moving back to the more familiar Core i5 and i7 branding except for the Core m3 at the low-end of the Y lineup. But it did deliver on its promise of fanless computing, and by providing a wide range of frequencies and very high Turbo frequencies, it still kept the snappy feel of Core. Overall performance was lower, of course, but the difference wasn’t as dramatic as you’d think in everyday tasks.

Unfortunately for the latest Y series, code-named Amber Lake, it still only offers two cores when the U series jumped to four, and it’s now at a disadvantage in overall compute even if the turbo for single-threaded is still quite high.

But I thought it would be nice to take a look at how the processor compares against the original Core M from 2015. The top-tier Core M was the Core M-5Y71, based on Broadwell and offering a peak Turbo frequency of just 2.9 GHz. Four years later, with a newer architecture and several years (some would say too many years) to tweak the 14 nm process, and we have Amber Lake which peaks at 4.2 GHz in the same power envelope. Not bad, right? To see how it compares I pulled some of the Cinebench scores out of our database for several Core M laptops we tested, as well as the latest Gemini Lake based Atom which is also a fanless design.

The latest Amber Lake Y series is a massive jump, and easily outperforms the other devices. The single-threaded results are of course bolstered by the extra Turbo frequency provided by the more advanced process, and even in the multi-threaded test which is certainly running into the TDP limits, it’s still well ahead. Amber Lake can’t hold its own against the most recent mobile quad-cores, but it’s still a big leap over the original generation of 5-Watt Core.

GPU Performance

Intel’s integrated graphics architecture has been somewhat stale for the last several generations, with small tweaks, and new media blocks, but no real performance increases or efficiency gains. The Intel UHD 615 in the HP Spectre Folio is further limited by an even more restrictive TDP.

Intel has been investing heavily in GPU recently though, and hopefully their next GPU architecture will address some of these shortcomings. But today we’ll see how the UHD 615 stacks up. Some laptops, such as the Lenovo ThinkPad A285, offer integrated AMD Vega graphics, and the Huawei MateBook X Pro features a low-powered NVIDIA GPU in the MX150, with the latest Huawei bumping that to the MX250.

3DMark

UL’s 3DMark offers different tasks with varying levels of complexity. Fire Strike is the most difficult we run on our laptop workloads, then Sky Diver, Cloud Gate, and Ice Storm Unlimited, the latter of which can also be run on tablets and smartphones. With just a 5-Watt TDP, the UHD 615 just can’t compete against the higher-powered laptops in our database.

GFXBench

Our second synthetic test is the latest from Kishonti and the latest Aztec Ruins tests utilize DX12. Despite the newer API, the HP still falls in at the bottom of this list.

Dota 2

Looking at a real-world 3D game, Valve’s Dota 2 is a great test for low-end machines, since it is playable across a wide variety of hardware. It utilizes DX11 for its API, and we’ve tested it on our value settings which are 1366x768 with all of the effects disabled.

Dota 2 can be surprisingly CPU bound. This doesn’t exactly help the Spectre Folio though, since the CPU and GPU are both sharing the same 5-Watt TDP, and therefore one has to make way for the other. The result is not great framerate, although the game is still playable at 44 FPS.

Storage Performance

HP offers a wide selection of SSD options, from 256 GB all the way up to a massive 2 TB. All of the SSDs are NVMe PCIe based as well. The review unit features a Samsung PM961 based SSD which is 256 GB.

Performance is quite good, even with this being the smallest SSD available. Larger SSDs will of course bring more performance as well with the extra NAND offering more parallel channels for data access.

Display Analysis

HP offers a couple of different display options in the Spectre Folio. The 1920x1080 13.3-inch display is standard, and if you want to spend a bit more, you can get a 3840x2160 panel. Both are IPS, and the review unit shipped with the standard 1920x1080 display. Although HiDPI is impressive, for reasons we’ll go over in the battery life section of the review, there’s no need to ever upgrade from the 1920x1080 display, which is one of the new generation “1W” displays that Intel has been working on.

The amazing part of the new display is that it doesn’t really sacrifice anything to achieve this level of power savings either, as we’ll get into below. The brightness and contrast are both excellent. You just save a whole bunch of battery life in the process. Displays are easily the biggest power draw in a laptop. A 15-inch Surface Book 2 draws 7.65 W of power just to drive the display at 100% brightness. The rest of the system only draws 1.43 Watts. On that laptop, the display consumes 5.34 times more power than every other component combined. Now, that’s not an apples-to-apples comparison to this HP, of course. The Surface Book 2 we reviewed was a 15-inch model, and has a much higher resolution, so a stronger backlight is required. The HP Spectre Folio’s display at maximum brightness draws just 1.71 Watts.

Display power draw is a huge concern for any battery powered device, and we’ve seen some impressive gains in the smartphone space. PCs have offered technologies such as IGZO and LTPS as TFT solutions to assist with the power draw issue, and it’s great to see Intel working on new techniques as well to combine the better TFT materials with other solutions to really drive down display power.

Next up, let’s look into the display accuracy and other characteristics. To do this, we leverage Portrait Display's CalMAN software suite with an X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter for brightness and contrast testing, and an X-Rite i1Pro2 spectrophotometer for color accuracy testing.

Brightness and Contrast

Despite the 1W display panel, the maximum brightness is quite good, offering almost 400 nits of brightness. The black levels are also excellent, which drives the contrast ratio to a very respectable 1577:1.

Grayscale

Portrait Display CalMAN

We’ve not tested an HP laptop in some time, but with this grayscale result it’s clear that they are not calibrating their displays at all. The average error level is 3.57 but it peaks over 5 at some parts of the range. In addition, the gamma is far too low.

Gamut

Portrait Display CalMAN

Despite the grayscale being off, the 100% levels for color are actually very close to where they should be, although magenta does drift quite a bit compared to the rest, but even it is still less than a dE of 3.0 which is pretty good.

Saturation

Portrait Display CalMAN

Taking the primary and secondary colors and testing them across the entire range, rather than just the 100% levels is our saturation test. Like gamut, the color accuracy is quite good for an uncalibrated display. Cyan and magenta both drift slightly, but not enough that it should bother anyone for any task that isn’t color-critical.

Gretag Macbeth

Portrait Display CalMAN

Our final test targets colors across the spectrum, and not just the primary and secondary axis. It includes the important skin tones as well. The overall dE average is very good, and as you can see there’s very few colors that peak over the 3.0 error level line. If the grayscale wasn’t partially included, the results would be even stronger.

Display Accuracy Conclusion

Clearly HP is not calibrating their displays at the factory, but the overall error level is pretty reasonable on this unit. If you are aiming for color accuracy, this would actually be pretty easy to calibrate without causing major issues with banding and such, since the color levels are already very good and it’s just the grayscale and gamma that need to be tweaked.

The low-power display also didn’t lose any brightness, offering almost 400 nits of brightness, and it also offers great contrast. Overall this is a good, but not great, notebook display.

Battery Life

HP outfits the Spectre Folio with a battery that is about 55 Wh in capacity, and coupled with the new 1W display and Y series processor, expectations are high for good battery life. We test a couple of different scenarios, with a light web test, our newer more demanding web test, and movie playback. We’ll be mixing in some new workloads with the latest PCMark 10 update too which has added battery life tests to its suite once we’ve got some more data to work with.

All of our battery testing is done with the display set at 200 nits of brightness, and there was no detectable CABC on this laptop to influence the results.

2013 Light

Our lightest test opens just four web pages per minute, and is not very stressful for modern laptops. The HP Spectre Folio has topped our chart with one of the best results we’ve seen on this test. At over 14 hours of runtime, it’s an impressive result.

2016 Web

This newer test is much more demanding and generally causes results to drop significantly, but the HP Spectre Folio managed almost exactly the same time as the light test – in fact it was a couple of minutes longer. With this kind of battery life, this is truly an all-day laptop.

Normalized Results

By removing the battery size from the results we can get a feel for how efficient each device is. The results are excellent. HP achieves amazing battery life and they don’t have to brute force the situation with a massive battery. On the 2016 Web result this is the most efficient PC we have ever tested. The combination of Y series Core and a low-power display are clearly combined with some attention to detail by HP and Intel when designing this device.

Movie Playback

When playing back media, the CPU can go to sleep as the work is offloaded to the media block in the GPU, and the result on most laptops is the highest battery life of any workload. That is definitely the case here. The HP Spectre Folio lasted almost 22 hours on a single charge which is insane.

Switching that into our Tesseract score, which is the battery life divided by the runtime of a long movie (The Avengers) and you could play over nine movies in a row before running out of juice.

Digging into platform power

The display is always the biggest power draw of any notebook, and that continues to be the case here even with the new “1W” panel. As mentioned on the display page, testing showed that at maximum brightness the display only drew 1.71 Watts of power, which is quite good.

But what’s even more impressive is the overall platform power. At idle, the HP Spectre Folio draws just 750 mW. That is almost half of what a Surface Book 2 draws at idle. HP has clearly done their homework to ensure every component is as power efficient as possible, and it shows in the end result.

Under load, the Y series Amber Lake processor also helps out significantly, as we saw in our 2016 Web Test. Generally we see a significant drop in runtime here compared to the older light test, but the Spectre Folio scored more or less the same. The lower TDP also means a lower peak power draw for PL1 compared to a U series processor, and that is another factor that helps the Folio achieve such great battery life.

Charge Time

HP ships the Spectre Folio with a 65-Watt AC adapter which has a USB Type-C connector, and the cord features a fabric cover and is quite long, which is welcomed since you never know where an outlet is going to be in some rooms.

Overall charge time is about on-par with most non-Lenovo laptops, and the HP charged to 50% in 56 minutes.

Wireless

HP has gone all-Intel for its networking options, and with the current state of PC wireless, that’s not a bad decision. The Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8265 network adapter found in the HP Spectre Folio is one of the best of the latest generation, perhaps only surpassed by the newer 9260, but for 2x2 performance on a typical 40 Mhz wide Wi-Fi channel, the 8265 is no slouch.

On our wireless copy we achieved an average over 500 Mbps, which is in-line with what other manufacturers have gotten out of this NIC. The performance is doubly good when you add in the stability and reliability of the Intel wireless drivers, which surpass all other manufacturers in our testing.

For those that need data on the go, HP also offers LTE featuring the Intel XMM 7560 modem for a reasonable $158.99 upgrade if you’re doing a per-system configuration. Coupled with the amazing battery life and stylus support, the HP Spectre Folio would be an excellent machine for remote work.

Audio

HP offers Bang & Olufsen speakers on much of their lineup, and the Spectre Folio is no exception, with four speakers located in a strip above the keyboard.

The speakers get reasonably loud, peaking around 82 dB(A) measured one inch over the trackpad, but as is typically the case in thin and light designs, the speaker sound quality is poor with a very flat sound. Worse yet, when you flip the device into tablet mode the speakers get covered over by the display and leather casing, muffling the audio even further.

With most devices of this nature, the speakers are fine for video conferencing and the like, but proper headphones would offer much better audio. The 3.5 mm jack is nicely located at the bottom left corner of the display, but is part of the hinge and not the display so it stays put when moving the display into other use modes, so you’ll always know where to find it.

Thermals

Leather isn’t known to be a great conductor of heat, and with no active cooling solution, HP has to rely totally on the chassis to dissipate the heat generated by the Core i7-8500Y under load. Luckily the TDP is only 5 Watts, so handling this isn’t quite as big of an issue as it would be on a mobile workstation. The motherboard unit is located in the top of the keyboard deck, so it does have some aluminum around it that it can use as a heat sink.

To see how the Spectre Folio operates under sustained load, we utilized AIDA64’s CPU stress test feature to run the system at 100% load for about an hour. This provided plenty of time for the CPU to go through its separate power levels and settle into its TDP.

As with most passively cooled systems, the end result isn’t a smooth line but more of a see-saw pattern as the processor tries to achieve maximum performance, runs into a thermal limit, slows down, cools down, and then ramps up again.

Interestingly the Core i7-8500Y, despite only having a 5-Watt TDP, has a PL1 level of almost 18 Watts which it delivers for about 12 seconds before moving down to about 10 Watts for an additional 62 seconds, and then finally settling into the final result, which was the system bouncing between 7.53 Watts and 4.22 Watts, averaging 6.13 Watts of power draw. This resulted in an average frequency of 2045 MHz, and an average temperature of just 60°C on the processor. So despite the leather design, the HP can actually deliver slightly higher than the 5-Watt TDP on the processor, and the system itself never gets very warm except right above the CPU which wouldn’t impact usage at all.

Software

HP goes light on the software, which is appreciated. The main addition is their HP Support Assistant software which appears in the task bar by default, and provides access to driver updates, support, and troubleshooting. It’s well thought out, and while not everyone will appreciate this software, it’s nice to have a single pane of glass to access all of the support for a notebook.

The driver updates can be set to automatically install, or prompt for install.

If you do have an issue with the notebook there’s a virtual assistant to guide you through troubleshooting, or of course you can contact actual support if it is something more serious. HP isn’t alone offering this type of software, but their implementation works well.

HP also ships with a JumpStart icon on the Start Menu, which offers software and services to go alongside the notebook. It’s likely not needed by most people who are familiar with Windows 10 but for those that are not I can see some value. The layout is easy to use and it looks nice as well.

Finally, HP ships the laptop with a subscription to McAfee, so if you’d rather use a different AV you already own, or the built-in Windows tools, you’ll have to remove this.

Overall the software selection is almost exclusively useful utilities, so HP gets a star here.

Final Words

HP has delivered a unique laptop in the Spectre Folio, offering not only the first bonded leather exterior, but also a different take on the convertible as well. Yet they haven’t sacrificed quality to achieve these goals. The HP Spectre Folio really is in a category of its own.

That category would almost certainly be a companion device where someone requires great mobility, battery life, and flexibility. The excellent styling and the fantastic feel of the leather exterior only elevate the Spectre Folio from there.

There’s a few downsides, as there tends to be with any notebook. When Core M launched in 2015, it could offer similar performance to U series devices in short workloads, and while the latest Core i7-8500Y ratchets up that performance compared to the original Core M, the performance gap between Y and U is much greater now that Intel offers quad-core in their U range. Still, the Spectre Folio can easily handle any light task thrown at it without any issues at all. App launches are still fast, and the system doesn’t feel sluggish under most office type tasks, and it’s really only in high-demand situations where the lowered TDP is going to be noticed the most.

HP, despite the leather exterior, still had no issues dealing with the processor even in a fanless design, and the work that the company has done with Intel to not only shrink the motherboard to provide more room for battery, but also to address power consumption is dramatic. HP’s battery life in the Spectre Folio was outstanding, easily topping our charts in some of our tests. The low-power display and attention to detail in the motherboard design has paid dividends here.

It would have been nice to see HP go with a taller aspect ratio display, because convertibles that are 16:9 are best used in landscape mode. They tend to feel awkward when rotated to portrait, and the large chin at the bottom of the display begs to be filled with more screen real estate. 3:2 works so well in convertibles that it’s a shame it wasn’t used here. Even if sourcing a 3:2 1W display would be difficult, a company the size of HP can certainly handle that.

The convertible design where the screen folds forward is another one of the unique features of the Spectre Folio, and it certainly has advantages. HP uses strong magnets to hold it in position as well, which makes it incredibly sturdy. Switching from one mode to another is not quite as easy as a 360° hinge, but it still works well and provides the added benefit of the keyboard being protected when in tablet mode. It still provides all the extra functionality you’d expect, but like the leather exterior, it’s just a bit different.

HP outfits the Spectre Folio with plenty of expansion, with two USB-C Thunderbolt 3 ports, as well as a third USB-C connector, and you can charge the laptop on any of them. We’re not quite in a world where Type-A can be completely abandoned though, so it’s nice to see HP also ship an adapter with the laptop.

HP has delivered an incredibly well-built, stylish, and usable notebook in the Spectre Folio, and they’ve done it with a design that is unmatched in the industry. The addition of offering LTE adds another dimension, and coupled with the incredibly good battery life, really provides a fantastic computer for working on the go. The convertible nature provides a great writing surface as well, and HP offers a stylus for just that reason. HP offers a great amount of customization, with plenty of choices for specifications as well as a couple of color options. Pricing is high, as expected, but the base model is completely usable, offering 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage, unlike some Ultrabooks that perhaps start with a lower price, but it only offers 4 GB / 128 GB and really isn’t very usable. The Spectre Folio isn’t inexpensive, and it isn’t the fastest notebook around, but the all-leather exterior makes a statement that no other machine on the market can match.