The HP Spectre Folio may sound like a brilliant gaming laptop, but it’s not. It is, however, one of the newest laptop HP has announced. Designed as thin, portable machines, the new HP Spectre laptop isn’t as much built for playing games, but it’s a piece of tech you’ll love to look at, if nothing else.
Reported on by PCWorld, the new HP Spectre Folio is a slim laptop coated in full-grain leather to the point where it looks like a tablet baked right into a generic iPad faux-leather folio case. You can see where the name comes from. Though it’s not the most powerful device you can toss into your bag, you and those around you will certainly appreciate the distinct leather smell every time you open it up on the tube or the company meeting room.
Serving up the same features you’d expect from a traditional folio case, the HP Spectre Folio can pivot into various angles (like cinema and tablet modes) with ease. However, the hinge ensures the new HP laptop can support itself on the 70 to 80 degree screen angle most laptops sport.
As for specs, HP has crammed some impressive hardware into the shockingly thin chassis. Under the hood, which is split between the screen and keyboard areas, you’ll find an 8th generation i7 8500Y processor, 8GB of LPDDR RAM, and a 256GB PCIe NVMe. The screen itself is a touch-capable 13.3-inch 1080p display with gorgeously thin bezels. It even comes with a USB-C pen and an impressive 18-hour battery. Specific specs will be customizable as more options become available further down the line.
Considering you could only look forward to an average frame rate of 40fps on low settings in Overwatch on an integrated Intel UHD 620 GPU, the UHD 615 found inside this isn’t going to offer you much more than the occasional game of League of Legends.
Rather than something like the Microsoft Surface Book, you won’t lose anything by flipping the HP Spectre Folio into tablet mode, as the laptop doesn’t need to separate from the keyboard or leather body to function as a traditional tablet.
The HP Spectre Folio goes up for pre-order today with a starting price of $1,300. A 4k version is expected later in the year.
