Gadgetory

i'm dan ackerman and we are here taking a look at the brand new HP envy 14 spectre last spotted at CES 2012 now unlike most laptops which are fairly generic looking gray boxes occasionally get something that breaks out of the design mold a lot of the time these really inventive designs things like the dell adamo XPS or the acer iconia the laptop with the two touch screens instead of a screen and a keyboard other just a little bit too quirky to really catch on over the company's behind them don't support them long enough and they just kind of fade out of you at least in the case of the spectre it's off to a good start because at CES in one our computers in a hard work category best of category and it generated a lot of buzz at the show largely because besides being one of the first 14-inch ultrabook laptops which just means that it needs intel's definition for what a thin powerful ultrabook is it's very unusual in that besides the glass all over the front of the screen there's glass on the back of the lid and even a glass wrist rest that runs all the way across here and incorporates a touchpad now on top of that there are few other cool features like beats audio which a lot of HP laptops have and even in NFC or near field communication antenna which means that if you take a compatible Android phone which they're not that many right now and you download this HP app you can then just place the phone right here and connect to the laptop and share data and playing around with it right now I can only share web pages but eventually hopefully you'll be able to do contacts and phone numbers and all kinds of other information maybe even photos now you may be asking yourself self why would I want a glass clad laptop isn't that kind of dangerous and yes that element of danger kind of makes it a little bit exciting but at the same time this is corning gorilla glass that is the same glass that's on products like the apple ipad and it's a fairly scratch resistant and shatter resistant I still wouldn't go push this off a table and you know hope for the best but you do end up with a very cool look and when you close it has a very nice slab like feel from the back while if you look at it from the front you'd almost think maybe it's a you know 15-inch macbook pro it's actually a lot smaller than that it's a 14 inch screen in something that's us to kind of a 13-inch body which means that it feels a little bit dense and heavy compared to what you think it would feel like when you first touch it the one part I wasn't super crazy about it's actually this glass wrist rest here it's fairly comfortable under the palms of your hands but at the same time it's got this abrupt drop off here it's just like a big slab a glass right there I will say multi-touch gestures on the big click bad are some of the best I've seen on a windows laptop so far the biggest stumbling block to the spectre seems to be its price it starts 1399 which is a lot more than just about any other ultrabook and for that you only get a standard core i5 cpu 128 gig SSD no fancy graphics or anything like that you can get pretty much the same specs and the 13 inch ultrabook that may not be as fancy for like 8 99 maybe a little bit less if you shop around that said the experience is a lot of fun the the design is very unique its eye-catching it's just a great laptop to carry around in use you are however paying a design premium but a lot of companies including Apple and maybe even Sony have gotten away with that for a long time there's no reason the HP Spectre can't either I'm Dan Akron and then is the HP envy 14 Spectre you