Detailed Review of HP Spectre x360 with 12th Gen Intel Core Processor

HP is one of the most prominent players in the portable computer market. Over the years, HP has built itself a reputation for being a brand that delivers quality. Being the industry leaders in the laptop sector, they also have a line-up of premium laptops. One such device is the HP Spectre x360, a direct competitor to the MacBooks and Dell’s XPS series of laptops.

This device comes with a hefty price tag, the lower variants sell for around 1.15 lakh rupees, and the cost of the variant (ef0054TU) we are writing a review about costs 1.5 lakh rupees. But the premium build and experience and all the features packed into this notebook make it worth the money if you are looking for a laptop with a truly premium feel.

In this post, we are reviewing HP Spectre x360 ef0054TU which costs ₹1,45,499 on Amazon. You can check out all the variants of this laptop at the end of this post.

First impressions and in-box items

Upon receiving the delivery from Amazon, I got straight to unboxing this thing. It comes in a medium-sized white box, having inside, two smaller containers, one with the laptop itself and another with a carrying pouch. The unboxing experience is not quite as premium as one of the MacBooks will have. Inside the other box is the laptop along with some accessories. The accessories include a 65W charging adapter along with a power cord, a USB Type-C to HDMI dongle, and a dark-silver colored stylus to complement the 13.5” touch screen this notebook comes with.

Build, design and ports

This thing has a solid build to it, unlike most other convertibles, the Spectre x360 has an aluminium build and barely any flex to it. It can be flipped 360 degrees around to use it in tablet mode, which, to me, felt rather smooth compared to the same functionality in Lenovo’s Yoga series of notebooks. The little stylus that it comes with, is pressure sensitive and is a great companion to apps like photoshop, illustrator and even blender.

Being extremely lightweight (1.3Kg) gives it an edge over other notebooks, the portability is boundless with this device, the 13.5” body fits conveniently into hands to carry around, and given its small form factor, it can fit into almost any bag you throw at it. Despite being this lightweight and portable, the Spectre x360 does not fail to be a sturdy device overall, I dare not throw it around on the floor because of how costly this thing is, but it has, till now, survived blows that my previous laptop could not.

What’s truly interesting in this notebook however is the variety of ports and their placement. HP has introduced some of the most innovative design upgrades with the Spectre x360 to make sure it remains as thin as possible all the while not missing out on any of the ports. The corners are cut out for the placement of certain ports, this design really gives the laptop a unique stylish look. Overall, the ports available in this laptop are:

Headphone/microphone combo, SuperSpeed USB Type-A – 10Gbps signalling rate, 2 Thunderbolt 4 with USB4 Type-C 40Gbps signalling rate ( along with support for USB Power Delivery, DisplayPort 1.4, HP Sleep and Charge).

Processor and Graphics

The Spectre x360 is equipped with the latest gen i7-1255u, intel’s new 12th-gen chip with 10 cores and 12 threads. This chip has an ultra-efficient design with a combination of performance-based P-cores and efficiency-centred E-cores, the P-cores do the heavy lifting while the much smaller and power-efficient E-cores help aid the simpler tasks, giving the laptop loads of raw processing power to handle tasks with.

As for the graphics processing unit, it comes with intel’s Iris Xe graphics processor, which is quite capable despite being an integrated GPU. It helps the HP Spectre x360 handle lightweight rendering and some games as well, although it is not a gaming laptop and thus cannot run the latest AAA games with the best frame rates, I have tested this for Valorant, Rocket League, GTA 5, and CSGO, all of them hit 60FPS even at high settings, however, it is not the one to opt if you are looking to play something like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Far Cry 6, Red Dead Redemption 2 or similar heavy AAA games.

Storage and memory

When it comes to memory, this laptop is a multitasking juggernaut. It boasts 16GB of LPDDR4X RAM with 4266 Mhz clock speed and can handle almost all of your daily usage apps simultaneously, you can run Photoshop, Chrome, Blender, Microsoft Word and Spotify all at the same time and still not experience memory overloads. I have tested it with my daily coding and photo-editing workflow and it runs smooth. However, I have noticed problems with video editing when 4k videos are involved, it’s rather more of a GPU overload than a RAM overload, 1080p video editing and even up to 2k works completely fine. The amount of RAM is not upgradable either, so you have to stick to the 16GB it comes pre-equipped with.

To handle your media files and documents, this laptop comes with a generous 1TB of PCIe Gen.4 SSD with blazing-fast transfer speeds. Due to windows being stored on the SSD, the booting time is negligible, and the time it takes to import files from storage into photo and video editing software is greatly reduced in comparison to an HDD or even some older generation SSDs. You can surely expect fast and smooth functionality from the Spectre x360.

The Display

The screen on this device truly steals the show, you don’t often see a whole 13.5” screen armoured with corning’s gorilla glass do you? And that’s barely the first of many things about the screen on the Spectre x360 that blow my mind. It’s almost bezel-less, and has 100% coverage of the sRGB colour gamut, making it a perfect pick for working professionals in the creative media industry, especially when combined with the stylus.

The display has a resolution of 3000×2000 pixels, and the screen is touch-sensitive, with multitouch support, which allows you to use it conveniently as a tablet when folded. The screen is non-reflective, which means that you can use this laptop even in the scorching bright sun without worrying about your eyes being damaged. Note that the display does not have a matte finish to it.

Keyboard, trackpad and webcam

The keyboard on the Spectre x360 has a premium build and the keys are quite big and have enough travel distance to prevent ghosting, however, the laptop does not have a num-pad, which to me, seems like more of a size concern than a design decision, but I sure do appreciate the big keys that go along quite comfortably for my typing style. The keyboard is well-backlit for use when lights are out, white is the only colour though, but I am happy with it because it fits the aesthetic of my room very well and has a very calm diffused glow that does not hurt my eyes even on the darkest of nights.

It has a fairly sized trackpad which is clickable, which means you can touch the trackpad and then press it to imitate the click functionality of a mouse. It also has a 5mp webcam recording at 1080p, and both the camera and mic have an excellent quality that stands up to the expectations of a laptop of this calibre.

If you are looking forward to attending meetings with this laptop, you won’t be disappointed, because it comes with HP’s glamcam software. Powered by HP’s command centre app, glamcam allows you to add more to your webcam to further refine it for your meetings. It has a feature called Auto Frame, which automatically detects your face as you move and zooms and pans in the same direction. Every room has different lighting, to make sure that is not a hurdle for you during meetings, glamcam offers a lighting correction feature as well, along with a set of filters that HP calls “appearance filters”. Both Auto Frame and lighting correction have found great utility in my meetings, but I barely ever bother with the appearance filters.

Battery backup and other interesting features

Battery life is something you will never find yourself worrying about with the Spectre x360. The laptop is intel Evo certified, which guarantees you 9+ hours of battery life per full charge upon basic usage. In my own workflow, the laptop lasts well over 7 hours on battery and surely is a great travel notebook.

But that’s not all, it also has a little fingerprint scanner which you can use to unlock the laptop, which in my case, is the single most used piece of hardware on the laptop. The webcam can be disabled with the click of a button to make sure your privacy is not put at risk, and the same button has a little notifying light on it which serves as an indicator.

The Spectre x360 also comes with a bunch of proprietary HP software that makes your life easier, such as HP quick drop which lets you share files across your connected devices simply by dragging and dropping. It also has its own interesting set of AI-enabled features that help the laptop even more convenient to carry around, one such feature is the auto-lock feature where the laptop locks itself if you leave it on in a backpack while in tablet mode.

Conclusion

There is no single conclusive outcome when you ask yourself “should I go for this laptop?” because if you are asking that, you probably have a budget that can accommodate this laptop and are probably looking for a premium laptop for office and personal use.

Personally, I loved the Spectre x360 quite a lot, but when it comes to buying a laptop, you must be aware of your own requirements and preferences. I would suggest looking into the competitors of the Spectre x360 to have a better idea of the products and what they offer, the best competition to this would be the MacBook Pro or the laptops from Dell’s XPS series of notebooks. I wish you luck choosing your next laptop!

Also Read: 5 Thin and Light Laptops Under 1Kg in India