Gorgeous looks, solid build, good battery life

On the heavy side, sluggish processor

The latest in HP’s most stylish laptop range certainly looks the business. But the Spectre 13 is let down by its surprisingly sluggish performance.

Chassis

With its sleek, brushed metal finish and unique ‘truffle brown’ colouring, this Spectre certainly catches the eye. It’s a thing of beauty, with subtle shading that seems to look slightly different each time the light hits it, so that sometimes it appears brown, but sometimes it looks more blue, or even purple.The classy finish extends to the inside too, surrounding the keyboard and outsized, stretched trackpad with a silvery effect. While the middle of the trackpad is smooth, the edges are a little rougher. These are designed to take advantage of Windows 8.1’s gesture controls, where you brush in from the sides of the touchscreen to reveal the charms or to switch windows. It’s a neat idea that offers a genuinely useful alternative to the touchscreen.

Sound and vision

The 13.3-inch touch-enabled display offers full HD resolution of 1,920×1,080 pixels. It looks decent, with bright, bold colours and sharp contrast. It offers good viewing angles too and is nicely sensitive to the touch. Beats Audio technology is incorporated into the sound processing, which tends to favour the lower end of the sound spectrum. No bad thing on a laptop really, where sound tends to err on the tinny side, and sure enough, the speakers turn out a pleasantly rounded sound — it won’t power a party, but it sounds pretty good to work to. It’s reasonably well served for connections, with two USB 3.0 ports and another for HDMI, plus an SD card reader. You’ll need an adaptor for Ethernet though, and at 3.23kg it feels a little chunky for an ultrabook — definitely one to rest on a desk rather than carry around while you’re working.

Performance

The 4th gen Intel Core i5-4200U is clocked at 1.6GHz and comes with 8GB RAM, which sounds pretty nifty, but the Spectre tended to disappoint in practise. PC Mark delivered an overall score of 4,240, which puts it in the same ball park as Samsung’s ATIV Book 9 Plus. But it converted our ten-minute test video in 4 minutes, 4 seconds, which was slower than expected, and frame rates while playing Portal were distinctly unimpressive — just 70fps. The numbers are academic however — the real problem was that it often took longer than usual to open programs, creating a general feeling of sluggishness — not what you want or expect from a classy-looking piece of kit like this.

Battery life held up very well however, and we got a little under eight hours of use out of it.

It’s a welcome surprise to see Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 on board, which would normally set you back about £60. You also get 50GB of storage on Box, a cloud service similar to Dropbox.