Hands On with HP's Leather Specter Folio

"It's a little retro," said Stacey Wolff, head of systems design at HP, unveiling the Specter Folio in a former warehouse located under New York's Linear Line Park. Indeed, you have the impression that the Specter Folio is designed to be aesthetically pleasing in a café and not match the angular lines of a corporate boardroom.

The biggest peculiarity of the laptop, however, is not the leather that envelopes it. It would be his complement of several magnets, which would allow you to detach the display from his back and attach it to the base of the keyboard, forming a kind of easel facilitating the reading of movies or the consumption of any other type of content to which you might think.

This "bridge mode" qualifies the Folio as a convertible laptop, but it is not a convertible computer in the traditional sense of the sense of the ability to rotate the screen 360 degrees to use the laptop as a tablet . Instead, a second magnet allows you to secure the screen flat on the keyboard, meaning that the keys do not protrude from the bottom to the bottom of the tablet mode.

During a brief demonstration, I found the magnets easy, even pleasant, to use. There is nothing awkward about manipulating the screen in its different modes. Even so, I could not help but notice that the Specter Folio was not particularly thin and light. At 3.28 pounds and 0.6 over 12.6 on 9.23 inches (HWD), it's actually bigger and heavier than the Specter 13 notebook it's designed to replace. This is all the more remarkable if you consider that the electronic components, the screen and the keyboard base, are extremely thin. HP essentially sacrifices the thinness and lightness for a luxurious leather.

And it's really luxurious. You can pre-order one now in cognac brown for a starting price of $ 1,299. HP plans to sell one in Bordeaux, Burgundy, before the end of the year, in time for holiday shopping. Both are full-grain leather, and an HP engineer who worked on the product design said that it was meant to conjure up a luxury handbag as much as the appearance of a computer portable. This means that the classic physical outdoor elements that you expect on a laptop, such as rubber feet to hold it in place on a desk and allow for airflow, are not there. Instead, you get a thin raised strip along the back edge.

When you think about it, the need for free space at the bottom of the laptop is actually a little less necessary because no fan cools on the outside. The Folio Spectrum uses one of the eighth generation Intel's new Y-series processors, which generates much less heat than the U-series chip that powers Specter 13.

Not only is the processor energy-efficient, but it incorporates, as well as the rest of the interior electronics, a bespoke design that maximizes computer performance in as small a space as possible. Because everyone hates plugging in its devices, HP has decided to dedicate 70% of the real estate from the keyboard base to the battery, which should allow an autonomy of 18 hours, according to the company's internal tests .

This means that everything else must fit into the remaining 30% of the base. Intel has therefore created a custom motherboard for the Specter Folio which consists essentially of a narrow band of silicon and transistors. (You can see it above.) There are only four ports – three USB-C connectors and one headphone jack – but the base is so thin that it does not fit the height of the headphone jack and so had to be relegated to the side. of the display.

Gigabit LTE with an eSIM

In the midst of all this familiar component redesign, HP has managed to integrate some wireless components that you will not find on most ultraportable computers in the US: a gigabit LTE modem, an eSIM chip, and a physical SIM card slot. . In the United States, it is compatible with T-Mobile, AT & T and Sprint. In addition, if you activate a new Spectrum Folio on the Sprint network, you will get unlimited data for six months.

The prospect of a laptop still having Internet access at no additional initial cost (well, anywhere access where the Sprint network is recognized as being late) is appealing, and it's something that Microsoft and Intel have been pushing fervently to offer manufacturers for over a year. . HP seems to have answered the call.

Almost everything else in the Specter Folio is as intriguing as its physical design and wireless capabilities. There is a full HD display (1920 to 1080), a diagonal of 13.3 inches, with a brightness of 400 nits. It is coated with Corning Gorilla Glass glass for added strength and the panel consumes only one watt of electricity, which is essential to achieve these 18 hours of autonomy. HP plans to offer a higher resolution (but energy consuming) UHD 4K option in time for holiday shopping, if you really want this type of screen to end up at this size.

HP also works with a very comfortable keyboard with sturdy keys and a relatively long ride for such a slim design. You can configure Spectrum Folio with up to 16GB of RAM, up to 2TB of SSD storage and with Core i5 or Core i7 processors in the Y series. A digital pen included with 4096 levels of sensitivity the pressure slips easily into the leather buckle on the right edge. Perhaps the only really disappointing aspect is that the laptop uses the same ridiculously small touchpad as Spectrum 13, which makes the mouse with big fingers very difficult.

It is clear that HP has decided to do something different with the Folio Specter. This is neither a conventional laptop nor a conventional hybrid convertible design, but it is also a tablet or easel for watching movies. To buy this machine, you have to pay attention to design and do not forget that leather adds as much volume as style. Nevertheless, we are looking forward to getting one in PC labs for formal testing. Stay tuned.