HP Envy 14 Spectre review

The Spectre isn’t the thinnest Ultrabook around, but at 20mm thick there’s ample room for a good selection of ports. As well as one USB3, one regular USB, a combined headphone and microphone audio jack, multi-format card reader and full-size Ethernet, the Spectre is also one of the first laptops we’ve seen with a Near field communication (NFC) reader, which will be useful to transfer information from devices such as NFC-enabled smartphones.

In terms of performance, the Spectre is fairly middle of the road – with a dual-core Intel i5-2467m processor running at 1.6GHz with Turbo Boost up to 2.3GHz, 4GB RAM and a 128GB SSD. It managed 41 overall in our multimedia benchmarks, so you should be able to run almost any everyday task without complaint, although more intense tasks and running several applications at once might push the system. Battery life is excellent – in our light-use test, the Spectre managed over eight hours away from the mains. This puts it ahead of all the other Ultrabooks we’ve seen so far, and is second only to the MacBook Air in the ultraportable category – only netbooks last longer, and they’re far less powerful.

The Spectre doesn’t have a discrete graphics chipset, and instead relies on its processor’s integrated graphics. It’s easily able to handle high definition video, either at 720p on the laptop screen or 1080p on an external display using the HDMI or Mini DisplayPort outputs, but you’ll struggle to play modern games on it. In our Dirt 3 test, it could only manage a jerky 13.6fps, proving you’ll need to lower your expectations as well as your detail settings to get a playable frame rate.