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If Microsoft made laptops, it'd make this: HP Spectre x360

Neat-looking convertible - not spectacular but does the business

All quiet on the keyboard front

All that aluminium and clever hinge malarkey adds to the weight, though, and makes the Spectre a little cumbersome to use as a tablet. But if you are resting it in your lap rather than holding it freehand, then that’s really not such an issue.

HP Spectre x360

Tablet mode: at 1.5kg it's a heavy proposition as a fondleslab

The 13.3-inch IPS display is a thoroughbred. Viewing angles are robust and it’s bright enough to use in daylight. The 72 per cent colour gamut (the Windows default) which gives rich but natural colour tones was also set during Microsoft's fine tuning. Numbers aside, it’s a nice panel to look at, all the more so for being frameless. I’ve not seen the Quad HD version but didn’t find myself pining for it. Like most laptop screens the Spectre’s is rather reflective but no more so than the competition.

As is becoming more common, there’s no capacitive Windows button below the screen but rather a physical button, here placed next to the volume rocker on the right-hand edge of the base. I find this more practical and more aesthetically pleasing.

HP Spectre x360

One of the bigger trackpads around

Like the display, the keyboard comes from a quality bloodline. The metal buttons are pleasant to the touch and have a decent 1.5mm of travel. I found that made for a more soothing typing experience than the MacBook Air or the majority of Ultrabooks I’ve used. The keyboard is also backlit and very quiet, an often overlooked feature but one I value as her indoors works nights and me a-tap-tapping away in the study can disturb her.

Given the Microsoft input, I half expected to find one of its precision touchpads but it's actually a regular Synaptics affair. Give the imminent arrival of Windows 10, I suppose the Windows-8 optimised features of precision pads are yesterday's news. The Spectre’s touchpad is large, actually, very large. At 140 x 65mm it’s one of the widest I’ve seen on a 13-inch laptop. It’s tactile and precise too. I couldn't ask for more.

HP Spectre x360 PCMark 8 scores

PCMark 8 Home and Work benchmark results

An Intel 2.2GHz dual-core Core i5-5200U Broadwell chip, HD 5500 GPU and 8GB of RAM give the Spectre a decent, albeit not out-of-the-ordinary performance. The benchmark test scores tell the same story. Averages of 2,400 and 2,650 on the PCMark8 Home and Work test runs were entirely unexceptional, as was the result of the 3DMark Skydiver test.

The write speeds of the 256GB ADATA SSD averaged around 280MB/s, which was rather humdrum for this sort of money. That’s down to it being a SATA rather than PCIe affair. The average read speeds of between 500 and 550MB/s were better but still nothing to write home about. HP says this is down to cost. It reckons most punters would rather have a slightly slower 256GB drive than a slightly faster 128GB one for the same money.

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