Gadgetory

hi I'm rich brown senior editor for CNET today we're gonna take a look at the HP Spectre 123 so this is HP's new high-end Windows 8 all-in-one it has a few interesting features but overall it's kind of a bust actually it's a little disappointing so you can see it's got a nice glass design up here it's edge to edge of course you also have a Cheers of input devices here there's a keyboard a mouse and a touchpad all are included with the system what does not have as a touchscreen that sets the system apart from pretty much every other high-end Windows 8 on one and the combination of the Mouse and touchpad are designed to offset the absent touchscreen but it really doesn't work as well as you want it to you're probably best just going with a mouse a keyboard entirely and getting rid of the touchpad even then it will feel like a limited windows 8 experience now the core of this PC is fairly decent this is the step-up model it cost about sixteen hundred bucks this actually makes it pretty expensive but it does come with a core i7 CPU ten gigs of RAM and a one terabyte hard drive it also comes with an entry-level NVIDIA GeForce GT 610 graphics chip but that's really not enough to make this a competent gaming PC and even newer titles on lower end settings won't play very well so on sort of unique feature of the system is it has a Near Field Communication receiver aka NFC now NFC is kind of an early technology and it doesn't really work as well as we'd like it to the idea is that you're supposed to be out to transfer data between say a smart phone in the system just by tapping it on the spot you may have seen that in the Samsung Galaxy s3 commercial but the problem with the system is that it doesn't recognize input from those other devices so we've swiped a samsung galaxy we've site to Nokia Lumia 920 and neither device is recognized by the system that's why the HP is not done a very good job of sort of introducing you to the NFC tag experience there's no documentation or anything really apparent about what those tags are included with the system and you have to download two apps from HP in order to make them work why they're not included in the system out of the box is sort of a mystery now you can see that HP has made some effort to make the design of the system stand out a little bit there's a nice sort of curving back support here in the monitor and inside that you actually find the motherboard you can take the whole back panel off and get to the memory and the hard drive if you're enterprising enthusiast you can maybe even dig a little deeper but for most people that appreciate the fact you can easily swap out memory and hard drive so that's cool on the side and the rear the base you can also find the ports for spc there's a couple of USB 3 ports HDMI input as well as some audio ports though there's no optical drive we're just not uncommon among hiring pcs these days actually and of course you can always add one now the core i7 chip gives the system some nice performance but the lack of a touchscreen and the fact that it's monitors small for its price kind of hurt the system from a value standpoint HP also includes some features that we're not entirely sure we want like the NFC receiver as well as the touch pad so if you're in the market for a higher-end Windows 8 on one I would probably skip the system so I'm rich Brown this is the HP spectre 123