HP Envy Spectre One review

The full-sized Chiclet-style keyboard was comfortable to type on, although some keys were slightly less springy than others, particularly the punctuation keys on the right hand side. The mouse also felt a little small for our hands, and its default responsiveness was just a little too fast for our liking, although this is easily changed in the Control Panel.

As the screen is so slim, the stereo speakers are built into the front of the stand. As with most HP kit they carry the Beats Audio brand, but this is no guarantee of quality and sound was no better than on other all-in-one systems we’ve reviewed. There’s little bass and everything sounded tinny, making the speakers suitable for the occasional video and Windows sound. For proper audio a decent set of external speakers or headphones is a necessity.

Thanks to the Envy Spectre One’s slim profile, there’s not much room for ports or storage. So, there’s no optical drive or TV tuner, but you get four USB ports (two of which are USB3), Gigabit Ethernet (there’s 802.11n wireless, too), SDXC memory card reader and an HDMI input, so you can hook up an external device, such as a games console, to the screen. Inside there’s a 1TB hard disk, which should be plenty for all of your files.

One of the Spectre One’s more curious features is an NFC chip, built into the base. It comes with two electronically rewritable sticker tags, which you can programme with the downloadable HP TouchZone Writer and Credential Reader apps. Once they’re installed, writing information to your tags is incredibly simple. If you write your email address and password to it, for instance, it will let you automatically log in to the PC when you place the tag on the NFC antenna. You can also write URLs to the tags to automatically bring up web pages, but you can only write one URL to each tag.

It’s also compatible with NFC-enabled smartphones, but we couldn’t make our Nexus 7 do anything useful. Touching the tablet to the Envy Spectre One while it was displaying an image brought up the option to beam the picture, but the Nexus 7 displayed a message telling us that the receiving device didn’t support large file transfers. We didn’t get an error message when trying to beam a contact, but then the Envy Spectre One didn’t display any acknowledgement of receiving the contact, either.

There’s no denying that the Envy Spectre One is an attractive bit of kit, on a par with the new Apple iMac (full review shortly). Sadly, it doesn’t quite cut it. The lack of power is disappointing, particularly at this price, while with think HP has missed a trick by not including a touchscreen. It’ a sleek and incredibly attractive all-in-one, but it simply costs too much for what you get.