Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

School has kept me busy recently so I haven't had the time to sit down and publish a review, but I've had my Spectre for a little over a month now and I can honestly say I'm a huge fan of this laptop. A little about me: power user, college of engineering student, and gamer. I grabbed this from Best Buy (i7, 256GB, 8GB RAM, 1080p, etc.) and I can say that this meets all the recommendations that the college mentioned and gets spectacular battery life. Since I've owned it HP has improved it's custom power save setting TWICE through updates. I know, that seems like a low number, but if you look at the way they handle drivers on most consumer laptops very few show updates after it goes to production. All but one of my drivers has been updated since I bought this laptop which means they are still supporting it and making the software better. That in itself should tell you that HP wants this laptop to do well. HP made this for users who are going to need a laptop that lasts and can complete heavy tasks. Let's do a component breakdown: //////Screen: 13" 1080P IPS (In-Plane Switching)\\\\\ -Pros- Quite beautiful even at 1080p. You can go to Best Buy and see it for yourself, but the one thing you cannot do at Best Buy is color calibration which is included in the software on this PC. It refreshes at 60Hz and there is no sign of ghosting at all. It is Pen enabled(!) if you have an HP Active Stylus or (sorry HP) the Dell Venue Pen which several people in Notebook Forum Reviews have said works better with less pressure. I have the Venue Pen (750-AAGN) which has fixed the battery life issue that the early Venue Pens had and doesn't require any pressure. I personally use this for note taking in class with OneNote and it does very well. There is a con, but I'll cover that below. As for finger touches, it totally gets them and I've never had an issue utilizing the touch screen for any commands. Also, in tablet mode the keyboard keys are disabled so once you fold it all the way back you can hold it however you need to. -Cons- Shiny screen = glare. It is an annoyance at best, but it had to be mentioned. I picked up the screen protector sold on here and it didn't reduce glare at all, but does well for protecting the screen. You can combat glare by raising the brightness past a certain level, but you sacrifice battery life to do so. The con for the Dell Venue pen is how close the tip has to be to the screen to have it be detected. This could be an issue with the pen and not the laptop, but in OneNote sometimes I have to touch the screen with the tip before it is detected. I can't say whether the HP Active Pen does this as well since I don't have it to compare, but I wanted to mention it. ////Chassis\\\\ -Pros- My first full aluminum body laptop and I see what all the fuss is about. Strong, smudge resistance, lightweight, and really thin. The charging port does not use large size HP charger, it uses a smaller port (4.5mm) at 45W and it located on the back right side of the laptop. Has a charging LED right under it that is orange while charging and white when full. It has three USB 3.0 ports: One one the left side and two on the right. Fan intakes are on the bottom and runs basically the length of the laptop and they feed a single fan that outputs on the back left side of the laptop. There is also metal volume and windows buttons for operating the laptop in tablet mode and there is an almost flush metal power button for quick turn on and suspension. On the right side there is a DisplayPort out, HDMI out, and a headphone jack. Only other thing I can think to mention is the hinges which have proven to be very well designed over all. I was a bit concerned since I use it in tablet mode so often that I would wear out the tension that allows it to rest at almost any angle. I've used it extensively the past month and it has the same tension as I bought it with, which is great. -Cons- Don't leave it in the sun; aluminum is heat dissipator so if it begins to heat up it will pass that heat on to your components. HP included a soft black (neoprene?) carrying case with the "Spectre" emblem depressed in the front. It is meant to protect the body from scratches, but it won't take a fall so don't count on that. ////Components and Performance\\\\ -Pros- i7-5500u where the "U" stands for Ultra low voltage. This means that when plugged in you get the power of the i7 and when unplugged it throttles back to give you tablet battery life. The 8GB of RAM is more than enough for Windows 8.1 (more than enough for Windows 10 as I've read) and you won't be slowing this down unless you really know what software to run. The SSD is M2 and mine is the 256GB variant. Computer boots up from cold to login screen in 4 seconds. My friends and I counted. The graphics card is the Intel HD 5500 and is capable of running Skyrim on low and a few other 3D games in lower fornat, but you're not going to run anything with maxed settings. Most all casual or tablet games should still land you several hours of battery life. Ran temperature tests with RealTemp and Prime95 and never exceeded 75C which is about 30 degrees under shutdown temps for that processor. Worked admirably well using Creo, Solidworks, and EagleCAD so no issues for my needs. -Cons- Fan gets loud when plugged in and running. Most often you won't hear it because the system unplugged won't pull much power, but if you're doing heavy work mine spins up and you can tell it is on. All components are soldered on so you won't be upgrading the RAM, CPU, or GPU in this laptop unfortunately. ////Keyboard and Touchpad\\\\ -Pros- Keyboard has great key travel, keys are spaced a good distance apart, and it is comfortable to type on. I have no issues of touching the touchpad while typing because it is depressed into the chassis and it all of the synaptics movements (two finger scrolling, pinch-to-zoom, etc) all happen smoothly. My fingers glide easily over the touchpad and it doesn't show the oil from my fingers which is great! Touchpad is enormous and there is a right and left click, but you have to click way to the right to activate it. Or you can tap with two fingers to right-click like on a Mac. There is also a backlighting key that stays lit so if you are noticing that it is getting dark in the area you are working in you can always easily find the backlight key. -Cons- Personally it doesn't bother me, but others have complained about the backlighting key on the keyboard. When backlighting is on all the keys illuminate and it works well in dimly lit to dark rooms. When you press the key to turn backlighting off the backlight key stays lit which bothers some. Again, I like this feature because I don't normally work in well lit areas, but others may find it annoying. ////Battery Test\\\\ For my purposes and mentioned above I charge this thing roughly every 3 days. The best I ever got consecutively was 10:10 at 40% brightness according to BatteryBar and that was while programming an Arduino through the USB port. The 1080P screen will get you the maximum battery life that you can get where the 1440p will likely cost you between 2-3 hours of battery to push the extra pixels. I recommend the 1080p screen for the average college student so they aren't tethered to the wall between classes. 1440p if you just want to watch Netflix in its full glory. Keep in mind: gaming framerates suffer at 1440p as well, so a game you could have run at 1080p may not work at all on 1440p. I'll be doing another full battery test soon that doesn't include draw from the USB port, but I can assure you that for once a manufacturer got close to its claimed battery life using their recommended power settings. ////Conclusion\\\\ If you've read this far I can promise you'll be impressed if you give this laptop a chance. Dollar for dollar you get better hardware and more features while costing less than a Macbook or Air. For me, this was the best use of my money and is serving me well every day. If you're the resourceful type you might even be able to run OSX on it. It will require some work, but it is possible. That's all from me; I hope this helped! tl;dr -- Highly recommended and the best laptop I've ever owned. No contest.