The HP Spectre Folio Review: Luxurious Leather Laptop

Final Words

HP has delivered a unique laptop in the Spectre Folio, offering not only the first bonded leather exterior, but also a different take on the convertible as well. Yet they haven’t sacrificed quality to achieve these goals. The HP Spectre Folio really is in a category of its own.

That category would almost certainly be a companion device where someone requires great mobility, battery life, and flexibility. The excellent styling and the fantastic feel of the leather exterior only elevate the Spectre Folio from there.

There’s a few downsides, as there tends to be with any notebook. When Core M launched in 2015, it could offer similar performance to U series devices in short workloads, and while the latest Core i7-8500Y ratchets up that performance compared to the original Core M, the performance gap between Y and U is much greater now that Intel offers quad-core in their U range. Still, the Spectre Folio can easily handle any light task thrown at it without any issues at all. App launches are still fast, and the system doesn’t feel sluggish under most office type tasks, and it’s really only in high-demand situations where the lowered TDP is going to be noticed the most.

HP, despite the leather exterior, still had no issues dealing with the processor even in a fanless design, and the work that the company has done with Intel to not only shrink the motherboard to provide more room for battery, but also to address power consumption is dramatic. HP’s battery life in the Spectre Folio was outstanding, easily topping our charts in some of our tests. The low-power display and attention to detail in the motherboard design has paid dividends here.

It would have been nice to see HP go with a taller aspect ratio display, because convertibles that are 16:9 are best used in landscape mode. They tend to feel awkward when rotated to portrait, and the large chin at the bottom of the display begs to be filled with more screen real estate. 3:2 works so well in convertibles that it’s a shame it wasn’t used here. Even if sourcing a 3:2 1W display would be difficult, a company the size of HP can certainly handle that.

The convertible design where the screen folds forward is another one of the unique features of the Spectre Folio, and it certainly has advantages. HP uses strong magnets to hold it in position as well, which makes it incredibly sturdy. Switching from one mode to another is not quite as easy as a 360° hinge, but it still works well and provides the added benefit of the keyboard being protected when in tablet mode. It still provides all the extra functionality you’d expect, but like the leather exterior, it’s just a bit different.

HP outfits the Spectre Folio with plenty of expansion, with two USB-C Thunderbolt 3 ports, as well as a third USB-C connector, and you can charge the laptop on any of them. We’re not quite in a world where Type-A can be completely abandoned though, so it’s nice to see HP also ship an adapter with the laptop.

HP has delivered an incredibly well-built, stylish, and usable notebook in the Spectre Folio, and they’ve done it with a design that is unmatched in the industry. The addition of offering LTE adds another dimension, and coupled with the incredibly good battery life, really provides a fantastic computer for working on the go. The convertible nature provides a great writing surface as well, and HP offers a stylus for just that reason. HP offers a great amount of customization, with plenty of choices for specifications as well as a couple of color options. Pricing is high, as expected, but the base model is completely usable, offering 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage, unlike some Ultrabooks that perhaps start with a lower price, but it only offers 4 GB / 128 GB and really isn’t very usable. The Spectre Folio isn’t inexpensive, and it isn’t the fastest notebook around, but the all-leather exterior makes a statement that no other machine on the market can match.