ET Reviews: HP Spectre XT offers loads of premium features at a nice price

HP’s new 13.3-inch Spectre XT is a great-looking Ultrabook with loads of premium features at a nice price. The XT screams design and you need to look at it closely to admire all the attention to detail.


It feels solid in the hand and you’ll mostly see either brushed aluminium or a soft touch rubber finish on the underside.

The screen has good viewing angles and brightness, but the 1366 x 768 pixels left us wanting more. With a machine that looks this good, a 1440 x 900 pixel screen should have been standard.

For connectivity, you get two USB ports (one of them is USB 3.0), a full-size HDMI, Ethernet, 3.5mm headphone port and a SD card reader.

The tapered design is 17.5mm at the thickest point and 14mm at the thinnest. The whole package weighs just 1.4kg.



Special attention was paid to the sound on this machine. Beats Audio technology and a total of four speakers – two in the usual place (the panel near the screen) and two on the underside – endow the Spectre XT with unusually loud and clear sound for a laptop of this size. The island-style (chiclet) keyboard feels great and is backlit too.

A nice touch is that the key that activates the backlight on the keyboard always remains lit, so that you don’t fumble in the dark. The touchpad is large and responsive – especially for multi-touch gestures.

Those who need truckloads of performance should stay away from an Ultrabook, but the Spectre XT still impresses with more than enough 'go' for most uses (but not gaming or 3D rendering). Battery life is an impressive 7 to 8 hours.

If you want a bigger screen & more performance at the same price, consider Lenovo's IdeaPad U410 which has a Core i7 processor and dedicated Nvidia G610 graphics.