Vegan nightmare: HP Spectre Folio
21.2.2019
Translation: machine translated
The most bizarre convertible of the year is here. Yes, opinions differ, because it's dressed in leather. Grandma and grandpa should be happy. But vegetarians and vegans won't be so happy: this is real leather.
I didn't know that brown leather caca valued a convertible so much that the manufacturer was forced to charge an exorbitant price for a lesser piece of equipment. I know we shouldn't draw any conclusions. But if you look at the equipment installed, you quickly realise that this convertible isn't a sensation in terms of value for money. Nevertheless, the product is likely to find its customers because its leather upholstery is second to none.
Technical data:
- Intel Core i5 8200Y
- Integrated graphics card: Intel HD Graphics 615
- 8 GB RAM (LPDDR3 1866, 2 x 4 GB SK Hynix H9CCNNNCPTALBR-NUD)
- SSD 512 GB (M.2 PCIe 3.1 x4, Toshiba KXG50ZNV512G)
- Slot for SIM card (3G and 4G)
- 13.30" Multi-Touch IPS display with 3840 × 2160 pixels (331 ppi, glossy, supports stylus input)
- Bang & Olufsen speakers, 3.5mm jack
- HP Wide Vision FHD IR camera with built-in dual-input digital microphone
- Accelerometer, gyroscope, eCompass
- 6-cell polymer Li-Ion battery with 54.28 Wh
- Windows 10 Home
Bold design with rare but useful ports
Leather and latex are a thing of the past, today it's aluminium and leather that are fashionable and almost as hot. If you wrap your laptop or convertible in leather, you can't do half measures when it comes to cooling. Or use a small processor that doesn't give off much heat. That's exactly what HP has done with this product and why you won't find any ventilation slots on the device.
Shut up, no one would suspect that the 1.49kg product isn't a leather bag or shirt. This makes the product exciting in a strange way, although the colour of the leather is frightening. Another interesting aspect is the fact that with this device you have a mix between dead organism and machine. The Spectre Folio is therefore almost a cyborg, 32.01 cm wide, 23.45 cm long and 1.54 cm high.
By the way, you can also use the convertible as a laptop, ....
.. as a laptop without a keyboard, ....
..as a tablet, ....
.. or as a tent.
Ports are few and far between on this device. But the few it does have are useful: HP has integrated 3 Thunderbolt ports on the right-hand side. This allows you to connect any external hardware, even if you need to use adapters. On the left side there's a jack and a USB 3.1 type C, which is also used to charge the convertible.
Large UHD screen with a bit too many edges
In addition to the leather, this device's 13.30" screen is clearly a focal point of the device. The Multi-Touch IPS screen offers a resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels (331 ppi), is glossy and also supports stylus input. The stylus and a leather strap to secure it are included in the price.
It's a shame that the edges of the screen are relatively thick. On the left and right I measure 1.5 cm, above 2.3 cm and below 3.8 cm. But the screen is very pleasant to use. Watching films is a real pleasure; the colours are rich and vivid. With "x-rite i1Display Pro", I measure an sRGB colour space of 91.7%. This figure is 64.4% for Adobe RGB and 68% for DCI P3. In terms of brightness, the screen has 281 nits, which is an average value these days and is good that there is no direct sunlight. Unfortunately, the screen isn't perfectly lit; at the top, you can see that brightness drops a little in the centre right. However, this is barely noticeable when working or watching films. The static contrast of the display is 921:1, the dynamic contrast 3697:1.
Keyboard and touchpad
On the chiclet keyboard, typing is extremely pleasant, fast and silent. It has a 1.3mm key travel, a clear trigger point that's not too hard, and large keys with lettering to match the slightly old-fashioned leather. The backlighting has two intensities. The layout of the CH keys unfortunately shows the Enter key shortened. What's more, the back-slash key is right next to the Alt-Gr key, which doesn't really delight me.
At 9.5 × 2.5 cm, the touchpad is small, but doesn't have any negative effect on usability. It always responds with ease and precision - whether scrolling or executing gestures. It's hard to press the buttons built into the top half of the touchpad. But they bounce back perfectly in the lower half.
Good speakers from Bang & Olufsen
Not everything marked Bang & Olufsen is good. But the four built-in speakers, and especially their sound, are certainly some of the best I've ever heard on a mobile device. Bass, midrange and treble are balanced and not unpleasant, even in very high-pitched sounds. What's more, you can turn the sound up quite loud, which is probably also due to the fact that there are four speakers built in here. Well done HP, because with the big UHD screen, the way is clear to enjoy movies on holiday in front of the Spectre Folio.
Battery performance: streaming YouTube
During YouTube streaming, I set the screen brightness to medium. Automatic shutdown occurs after 6 hours and 47 minutes. That's pretty poor performance, as the results of the five Ultrabooks recently tested show. That would put the Spectre Folio in second-to-last place.
Note: the battery lasts much longer for everyday office use. Depending on activity, I get up to 9 hours of battery life for more.
Battery performance: stress test with HeavyLoad and Furmark
To push all the hardware to its limits, I run the HeavyLoad stress test as well as FurMark with the highest screen brightness. The battery is drained after 2 hours and 38 minutes, which is a long time, but not surprising given the low power consumption.
CPU and graphics processor
The Intel Core i5 8200Y dual-core 64-bit SoC processor was introduced in late summer 2018 and is aimed at passively cooled tablets and laptops. It is based on the Amber Lake architecture and is manufactured using the 14-nanometer etch process with FinFET transistors (14nm+). The two processor cores have a frequency of 1.3 to 3.9 GHz. The thermal envelope(TDP) of the processor is 5 watts, but can also be configured to 7 watts by the manufacturer (base clock frequency of 1.6 GHz).
The chip contains Intel's UHD Graphics 615, which runs at 300 MHz and has a maximum dynamic frequency of 950 MHz.
Performance: Cinebench R15 - hard to do worse
With Cinebench R15 from Maxon, you can test your PC's performance when rendering Cinema 4D content. Processors with more cores will always show better results. If you want to compare processors with Cinebench R15, they must therefore have the same number of threads.
Here's the performance of the leather convertible:
If you want to compare this result, Microsoft's Surface Go, equipped with an Intel Pentium Gold 4415Y processor, is the ideal candidate. This processor also has 2 cores and 4 threads, with a frequency of 1.61 GHz. What's more, the same graphics processor is integrated on this SoC.
In terms of CPU score, the Spectre Folio scores better (231 points) than the Microsoft device (162 points). But when it comes to fps in the OpenGL benchmark, HP clearly gets dominated by the competition with 19.14 fps. The same graphics processor achieves 30.78 fps on the Surface Go.
Performance: Geekbench 4
Geekbench 4 is a cross-platform performance test. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. In version 4 of the CPU performance test, the base value of 4000 points reflects the performance of an Intel Core i7-6600U clocked at 2.60 GHz. In addition to the simulated real-world scenarios used to test CPUs (single core and multi core), Geekbench can also determine GPU performance in image processing and computer vision. You can also compare results with other systems using Geekbench-Brower.
The Spectre Folio's results on Geekbench:
If I make another comparison with Microsoft's Surface Go, the situation is reversed in terms of graphics performance for Geekbench 4. The HP convertible scores 30,556 OpenCL points, while Microsoft only scores 25,060. When it comes to CPU performance, the Spectre Folio gets double the score (4600 to 1995 single-core, 7913 to 3864 multi-core).
If you'd like to see the benchmark results in detail:
Bottom line: overpriced.
It's a shame that HP is emulating manufacturers such as Razer, Microsoft and Apple in its pricing policy. For a convertible created for the office, for surfing the internet and watching films, I would never spend that much. Unless I fell into a leather fetish.
Bad performance aside, you get a well-designed device with good features. The UHD screen and good speakers are a pleasure when watching movies. The feel of the keyboard and touchpad is also very pleasant. As a result, and also thanks to the ample battery life, the convertible is also ideal for working in the office. Or at least as long as you can do without a numeric keypad.
Martin Jud
Senior Editor
martin.jud@digitecgalaxus.chI find my muse in everything. When I don’t, I draw inspiration from daydreaming. After all, if you dream, you don’t sleep through life.
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