Customer Ratings & Reviews

It’s really performing far beyond my expectation. In office I use it as my desktop, connected to a 38inch UHD monitor, on the way it perform well with high processing capacity and long lasting battery.

I have to admit, I felt like I was being inducted into James Bond villainy as I was opening the inner box. The outside box is what you would expect, corrugated cardboard. The inner box, however, is a smooth, fancy black topped box with "SPECTRE" emblazoned in silver on the top. I had one annoyance at the very beginning. In my haste to unwrap or peel plastic off of everything, I removed the sticker from the Stylus and it resulted in my having to apply rubbing alcohol to remove the sticker residue from the stylus. Otherwise, the system performs very well. Comparing Specs to Price, the Spectre x2 beats the new Microsoft Surface Pro 4. The Spectre x2 packs in over 1 million more pixels in its display, and gives you over 100 GB more SSD storage space with a price tag that's $200 less. Plus the Spectre x2 includes a professional looking vinyl sleeve, a keyboard and a USB-C to USB-A adapter. All of which are separate accessories on the Microsoft Surface Pro 4, making the price difference even wider. I'm disappointed that the Spectre only has 2 USB-C ports and an audio jack. I would like at least 1 USB-A port. I've played with previous Surface tablets at work and I was annoyed by the slowness of those devices with their M-type processors and with their near constant fan noise. I was concerned that the 8GB of RAM would starve the Spectre x2's i7 processor, but I have yet to see the Tablet really struggle with performance (probably because the SSD runs quickly). The fan comes on rarely. Pen input is very responsive. The stylus has 2 buttons, one for left mouse click, the other for erase. I kinda liked the Surface pen more because of the button on top that simulated an eraser when used on the screen and double-clicking it would open up OneNote. But I'm sure I can find the setting to allow me to open OneNote quickly with either of these buttons. The keyboard is pretty solid. It does not seem flimsy like the Microsoft Surface keyboards. The Spectre x2's touchpad is large. My 2.5 year old work laptop has a touchpad smaller than my palm. So it's been quite the adjustment for me to the touchpad on the Spectre x2 which I would guess provides 50% more width. I find myself clicking in the wrong place when trying to do a right-click. Clicking in my previous Surface experiences have felt a little shallow, but the Spectre x2's click travel feels very nice. Aesthetically, HP has done a good job. The case has a dark coffee color to it and is accented with a dark golden kickstand and HP logo. I wasn't a fan at first of the look of the texture on the underside of the keyboard, but it provides substantial grip on a table or in your hand. The kickstand has at least a 150 degree range of motion and feels solid the whole time. It features a magnetic closure, so you never have to worry about it flipping out if you're carrying it wrong. I also like that the speakers are front facing and produce good sound with the Bang & Olufsen name behind it. Overall, this tablet is a solid performer with well thought, sleek looks.

I'll start with the design. In typical HP fashion, the aesthetics really hit the mark for me. The Ash Silver aluminum frame is complemented by Gold (colored) trim. The display is a 3000 x 2000 IPS panel with touchscreen (and a pen for good measure). Screen sharpness and intensity is very appealing to my eye, at least. The backlit keyboard attaches with magnets, and has a nice retention feel. It folds nicely and makes for a "laptop-like" look, or may be detached and used solely as a tablet. Internal I/O is headlined by a PCI Express 3.0 SSD (aka NVM Express), which makes overall system performance really pop. This drive is approximately 3x the speed of standard SATA III SSDs, and the latency is much lower with NVMe. There are two USB 3.1 Type C ports, a headphone/mic jack, and a micro-SD slot for external I/O. Bluetooth and integrated WiFi are also included as part of the overall I/O. Battery life is pretty reasonable given the attractive form-factor, yielding about 8 hours of use from a full charge. This is a solidly designed product, typical of HP design standards, and given its performance should serve me well for a few years to come.

The HP Spectre X2 was clearly created to compete with Microsoft Surface Pro line of 2 in one computers and it is at least even in just about every way I can think of and is better than Microsoft's offerings in many ways. First, and least importantly, the presentation and visual of the Spectre is better than the Surface. It's a well built machine that looks good on your desk or on the couch next to you. The coloring is nice and more appealing than the gray of the Surface. Also the keyboard seems to be a higher quality. One other big plus for me as far as the keyboard goes, the hair from my cat (who loves to lay on electronics) and dog wipes right off of the finish that HP put on the outside of keyboard cover. I hated how it would stick to the felt cover of the Surface keyboard. Next, the Spectre X2 wins on value to me. While its not inexpensive, at least HP included things like the detachable keyboard, stylus/pen, a sleeve for storage, and an adapter for the USB type C ports. Microsoft makes you buy extras like the keyboard for its Surface and Apple makes you buy anything extra for practically all of its devices. Besides the items included in the box, the Spectre X2 is more reasonable in price. The Spectre X2 model that I got has the Intel core i7 CPU with a 360GB SSD and 8 GB of RAM. For a Surface, you're either paying a little bit more for an i5 CPU and less storage (once you add the keyboard and other extras) or paying significantly more for a Surface with a i7 CPU and less storage before you add on the keyboard. For the price, the HP Spectre X2 is a clear winner. Some things about the performance of this machine. The screen on the Spectre X2 is beautiful. Everything looks great on it. the high screen resolution really shines. The i7 CPU and 8 GB RAM handle everything that I have thrown at them in my short time with this computer. I can get from boot up to work/play in no time at all. There's no hesitation in opening apps/programs and everything just works. Like the Surface, the Spectre X2 is no gaming machine, but Intel's Iris Plus Graphics will support easily support games that don't require the very best graphics cards. I loaded up some Blizzard games, like Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm, and they all performed and looked good. One thing that did surprise me was the quality of the speakers. They are much better than I expected. Being forward facing does help since the sound is projected towards you while you are using the computer. The battery life is as you'd expect from any laptop. Basic web browsing got me around 7-8 hours of battery life and more intensive things like Netflix or playing games cut that time down quite a bit. The one thing that I don't like about HP's offering is the charger that they supplied with the Spectre X2. I got used to having the USB slot on the charger that Microsoft supplies with the Surface to charge my phone or tablet without needing to use one of the precious few connection ports on the computer. I guess of all things to be lacking on, this would be the best one to fall short in. Overall, I really like what HP built with this version of the Spectre X2. They did an A+ job of building a super portable computer that has great specs to do just about anything you'd want to on a new laptop. If you're in the market for a new laptop, you can't go wrong by making the Spectre X2 your choice!