Gadgetory

when I first heard HP was making a laptop wrapped in leather I knew we had to get one if for no reason other than to poke fun of people with more money than brains but once I found out about it heaps of battery life gigabit LTE connectivity and super interesting hinge design I started to come around to the notion that the spectre folio might be more than just a pretty face we could be looking at right now a serious contender against the MacBook Air and the surface laptop honey is a free web browser extension that will find you the best promo codes on shopping websites like Amazon eBay and more get it today at join honey calm /lt tea there are two things you're going to after you figure out the stupid pending there are two things you're going to immediately notice about the specter fully off first that it's covered in leather and second that leather smells really good it's actually kind of amazing how much a scent can change our perceptions like pulling this machine out of your bag there's like this this feeling of for me anyway of like readiness like the the closest analogs that I have are pulling on my riding gloves and stretching them out a little bit or cinching up a horse saddle ready to mount like it's just it's kind of crazy and it also feels great to hold with it's nicely rounded spine it just feels professional but once opened up my feelings about the specter folio do get a touch more complicated so the way that the leather wraps around the screen creates this kind of weird-looking double bezel I I really wish they could have had the leather end right at the edge of the display and overall I think given another generation they can probably improve the way that the metal components transition to the leather ones and then there's this pen holder frankly speaking it's stupid like could they not figure out any better way to secure this to the side of the display honestly I would rather they had just done nothing I'd rather they say wear a shirt with a pocket in the front and put it there because other than that the overall feel of the machine is very solid there's virtually no flex to this thing and I trust HP when they say that the leather is not gonna wear quickly like this is really nice it's the same kind of stuff you might find in say a Mercedes now IO is pretty bare-bones ish but overall the three USB C ports two of which are Thunderbolt 3 all of which can be used for charging give you a lot of flexibility to connect other devices to the folio provided you're willing to dangler two and a headphone jack is thankfully present now the display comes in both 1080p and 4k varieties are rocks at 1080p one and given the screen size I really don't see any need to go higher than that and thankfully HP has provided the option to have touchscreen on either resolution good work you guys a problem with the display though is that it feels like there is a lot of wasted vertical real estate here like going from a surface laptop or a 20-18 macbook air to the folio is gonna be jarring and it's made that much worse by this massive chin bar hanging out here that would in a perfect world just be more display for a 16 by 10 aspect ratio it is nice to see a fairly good webcam implementation though and the inclusion of Windows hello facial recognition is a huge plus overall the display still gets an A for its excellent brightness colors and touch support which goes well of course with the convertible nature of the spektr folio this is quite possibly its strongest point like this is a really smart 2 in 1 laptop design it's got these nice strong magnets so you can still operate it like a normal laptop but put a little bit of pressure like this and boom moving from one mode to the other is very simple and the ever so slight incline when it's in tablet mode allows the included pen to be used very comfortably again though I really hate the way it secures to the device but the writing experience is solid comparable to that of the surface pro even if it doesn't quite keep up with the near instantaneous responsiveness of the iPad pro now you do carry around more bulk than the surface pro but I mean I think that's a trade-off a lot of people would be willing to make for the ability to use the folio on their lap without it kind of falling off and it's really nice that unlike some chewing ones the keyboard is not going to end up getting scratched up in tablet mode so it just looks kind of ratty and gross after a short while the speakers are pretty good with X clarity making them great for hearing dialogue like in video calls obviously very business oriented products but as you might expect they do lack bass and their grill takes up a lot of space at the top of the notebook that I just I really wish could have been used to move up the keyboard and make space for a bigger trackpad look at this poor thing actually we should talk about the keyboard first here's what I can say about that that's positive if you finger peck or you type pretty heavily you might actually really like it the travel and the tactile feedback are both solid but for both me and Alex and we do often disagree about these things the stiffness of the key switches and some noticeable inconsistency in their key stabilization made it really difficult to get into a groove and maintain our top typing speeds that's a shame now the experience will be better if you have smaller hands since your palms will sit on this delightful leather palm rest instead of on the edge of the device but when you compare it to the comfort of the surface laptop and the MacBook Air it just doesn't quite hold up and then coming back to the trackpad well it's also kind of matte there's slightly more force required to click it than I'd like and this completely rules out Alex's thumb padding technique ways typing and it's out of the box acceleration curve is weird at best it kind of seems like they're compensating for something you know what I'm talking about no like literally it seems like they're compensating for the small size of the touchpad to make sure you can actually get all the way across the screen overall it gets I don't know c-plus so that was the pretty bad stuff but there are more good things LTE support means that you can be productive from basically anywhere like it baffles me that features that we take for granted on a couple hundred dollars Mart phones like SIM slots and decent cameras have taken so long to take off in ultrabooks maybe this is changing though so a device like this along with cheaper data will make it so that you don't have to worry about things like airport hotel or coffee shop Wi-Fi and all the security concerns that go along with them and this feature is perfectly complemented by the spectre folios incredible battery life the shocking fifty four point three watt hour battery in this thing complemented by a low-power processor and one watt display means that you can expect LG grande levels of freedom with the folio even if it is a touch heavier and the low-power processor brings other benefits the Spector folio is completely passively cooled and comes with a built in coffee break feature that is to say that in short tasks the dual core Core i7 is pretty snappy but if you ask this thing to do anything even remotely resembling heavy lifting like even just installing a program you might find that you've got a minute to run over to the break room and see if anyone brought in snacks today okay yeah I was being facetious there that's not really a feature um and honestly this was kind of a confusing thing about this device to me because on HP's reviewers guide the number one pain point that HP identified for Millennials was performance but then that's where they ended up making the specter folios biggest sacrifice well I mean other than the cow that they slaughtered in order to manufacture it the dual-core processor makes it noticeably slower while performing tasks like basic video editing working on small CAD files and doing more serious photo work and this wouldn't be a problem except that basically every other Ultrabook on the market with the notable exception of the MacBook Air has twice the core count at least as an available option and with the specter folio coming in at about the same price as the surface laptop that makes it tough to recommend it gets some things really right like the hinge design the battery life and mobile Internet and it really does feel good but it gets enough things wrong but I find myself intrigued to see where they'll go with the next one rather than ready to pull the trigger today it does feel good though I think it feels good if you're a small business owner it does not feel good to go home at the end of the day and be fighting with your accounting software rather than spending time doing what you love or with your family or whatever the case may be in fresh books is all about taking that accounting work that you might end up having to do at the 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