NOW AVAILABLE: HP Spectre XT TouchSmart Ultrabook 15t-4000 (12/4)

Perhaps it's only in certain configurations? The one i used which was bought retail at Frys 15-4010nr most definitely did not because we went looking for it

 

Buy HP Spectre XT Touchsmart 15-4000ea Ultrabook, Intel i5, 1.7GHz, 4GB RAM, 500GB, 15.6

This one (from the UK) has something called HP NFC for URL sharing, and it seems to be the base level configuration.

 

That is a different configuration. The one we tested had an I7 1.9 GHZ, 8GB RAM

 

That also says it gets 9.5 hours of battery life, I can tell you it does not ;-)

 

WPWood,

Are there any cosmetic defects that has caught your attention yet? How's the heat & noise?

 

Looks like there may not be enough space to attach a Kensington lock with the power cord connected, especially if you have a broad lock like I do.

 

I have found that the fan is not distracting when doing web browsing and watching Netflix. I haven't tried turning off HP Coolsense yet. Luckily the fan is pretty quiet and does not whine.

I like the material on the bottom. It has a warmer feel than the palm rest. The palm rest is very nice though, big and comfortable.

 

I played Netflix for 100 minutes and got to 50%. It looks like you could stream Netflix for about 3 1/3 hours. This was two steps down from the highest brightness.

At the same time I tested the Yoga. The Yoga can stream Netflix for about 5 1/4 hours at one step down from highest brightness. The two were matched in brightness as far as I could tell.

Doing something less strenuous like browsing the web at a lower brightness, you might get more like 4 hours?

This is the main downside to this machine that I have found. It's fast and quiet with a gorgeous big touch screen.

 

See that doesn't seem that bad, as far as battery life is concerned. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but doesn't streaming media drain the battery faster than playing local (which is something I'm more inclined to do)

 

The HP Spectre XT TouchSmart Beats audio is quite good in my opinion. First, it can get quite loud. Secondly, the characteristics can be adjusted extensively via the Beats Audio control panel. There's a complete audio equalizer as well as controls for sound stage that let you adjust center, focus, and spaciousness. The bass is not great but it's better than the Yoga and my old Thinkpad T60p.

So, no issues with the audio

 

Device Manager says that USB 3 is on-board, but it doesn't appear to be working!

The two USB 3 ports aren't colored blue like on other laptops, and when I hooked up an external drive to them I was getting USB 2 speeds from them - 30mb/sec. On the Lenovo Yoga I can get 90mb/sec from a USB 3 port.

Does anyone know how to tell whether a port is USB 3 or not?

 

Did anyone get their's today?

 

Yes I did get mine today but not have been able to play with it. I had to hide it from the wife. I think I may have to bust it out tonight after everyone goes to bed.

I can hardly wait.

 

I tested my external USB drive using CrystalDiskMark in each USB port and I can confirm that the left 2 USB ports are USB 3 and the right one is USB 2. With my drive I got 90mb/sec sequential read speed in the USB 3 ports and 30mb/sec in the USB 2 port. Before I was copying files from the USB drive to the internal drive and was only getting 30mb/sec for some reason on all 3 ports, although I still don't understand why since the Lenovo is faster. Perhaps because the Lenovo has an SSD as the C: drive.

Phew!

 

Did you get a chance to look at it?

 

I had to wait till this morning. but I am playing on it now. This is my first experience with Windows 8 so there are a lot of new things to learn. Very happy with the laptop so far. It feels pretty light for a 15 incher.

 

Anyone else got any comments on battery life?

 

A warning about the warranty for those who bought the customizable 15t-4000. My receipt says the warranty is 2 years, and on the bottom of the PC it also says 2 years. However when I ran the HP Support Assistant it only listed the warranty as 1 year. I chatted with a support consultant and although he couldn't access my order for some reason he said they will up the warranty to 2 years within 48 hours... here's hoping!

 

Is the hard drive easy to upgrade to an ssd on this machine?

 

Once you get past the 14 Philips screws in the bottom, should not be hard. The wrinkle will be disabling the mSATA SSD cache, but you can do that from the Intel Rapid Storage Technology console.

I posted a link to the manual earlier in this thread which tells you how to take it apart.

I do have a question about the speed of the SATA port, whether it is 3gb or 6gb? How would you be able to tell?

The mSATA cache drive is 6gb. There's the option of replacing that drive as well.

 

Not going to try but there is no easy remove panel looksvlikevyou have to take the whole the bottom of the panel off to get to it. Funny I thought I had a problem with mine. The black pinhole next to the trackpad on the left side. I guess that is a light sensor? For backlighting on the keyboard. Anybody try to put iTunes on this yet? Wonder if that is going to work with windows 8.

 

It's not as light as I would like, 4.5 lbs or under would be better. The power cord is huge, would have thought they could trim that down a bit.

Also, it's pretty wide at 14.87". Doesn't fit my old laptop bag very well. I really would love to see a 15.4" 16:10 1920x1200 IPS touchscreen laptop running Windows. Only Apple makes them now as far as I can tell, except for the touchscreen part, which I really like.

The pinhole next to the trackpad is a light, indicates whether the trackpad is on or off. I turned mine off by accident, so I disabled that function but I forget how.

Funny thing about the keyboard backlight, sometimes it reflects in the screen and I have to turn it off :-(

 

yeah I guess I accidentally turned it off, i double tapped the little square within the trackpad, and the light came on orange, so i figured that was not good and double tapped it and it came back on. It's a big learning curve w/ windows 8. . .

 

Intel's Rapid Start technology is configured on the HP Spectre XT TouchSmart. This wakes your computer after 2 hours of standby and writes memory to an 8gb partition on the SSD, then shuts the machine off. When you press the power button, it reloads the memory from the SSD in about 5 seconds. It's basically a fast hibernate. But HP doesn't install the configuration utility for Rapid Start so you can turn it off or change the hibernation time. Here is the download for it:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=21612

 

The two big things are that there are 14! screws to remove with two different screw sizes too.

Second is that even after you remove the screws, you still have to peel (for lack of a better term) the bottom off and it takes more effort than you might be comfortable with and makes a cracking sound that sounds for all the world like you are breaking it.

For those that are considering upgrading the drive, be aware that the spinner is only 7mm tall so you may have trouble finding a drive that fits.

I was doing this on behalf of our VP who bought one. Besides the middling battery life he also though the drive/cache combo was still slow. He ended up putting in a 256 GB msata drive in place of the cache drive and uses the 500 GB for data storage.

And yes, both ports are SATAIII

Also iTunes works just fine, though it is not a native "modern UI" app. Which means that you are sent to the desktop mode when you launch it. Though you can get back to the tiles just hitting the windows key

PS: ITunes is a total PITA to try and use by touch. Better off with the trackpad

 

Hey guys,

For anyone who is interested in the laptop amazon is selling the 4010nr cheaper than HP themselves; $1200! Amazon.com: HP SPECTRE 15-4010nr 15.6-Inch Laptop (Silver): Electronics

I'm getting mine in early January. So I'm pretty excited!

 

Some issues with the Spectre are it has a short and wide aspect ratio, it has small fonts due to high resolution, and the Beats audio is "optimized" to sound loud and gritty. I've made some adjustments which you can see in the attached image, and described here:

1. Turn Beats Audio off and adjust the equalizer to minimize distortion and bring up bass and treble
2. Set the display Custom Sizing Options to 113% (leave the XP style scaling checked) to make icons, window borders, and text slightly larger and more "finger friendly"
3. Set Google Chrome page zoom to 125% - you can adjust individual web sites up and down using Ctrl + and Ctrl -
4. Moved the task bar to the right hand side of the screen to give more vertical screen space and make it easier to launch applications with my right hand

 

Can't see the attachment (maybe because it's got a space instead of an underscore?). Are you saying the 16x9 aspect ratio on the screen is short and wide? Only the Retina Macbook Pros use a different aspect ratio these days. If the actual form factor of the laptop (due to bezel size, etc.) is even wider than usual, that's worth noting.

1 - "Beats Audio" mode is just an equalizer setting. It's intended to be louder and sound more full-bodied to the untrained ear, but most audiophiles change the equalizer settings pretty quickly. It's nice to have that option, though - not all audio drivers offer that functionality without third-party software.
2 - You can also adjust icon size with control and the scroll wheel while focused on the desktop. At least, I believe that's the shortcut. I don't believe that it changes font sizes, though. Many people consider a 15" 1080p screen to be the right size for the default settings, but it can be a bit small for some.
4 - Do you find the touchscreen functionality truly useful on the desktop, or are you simply trying to make it work for you?

 

I have had a few hours messing around with the laptop now and Windows 8. I am starting to get more comfortable with both. The screen on this laptop is quite nice. I had no problems putting on itunes 11, turning on home sharing and copying my music library over from my imac. The most annoying thing so far is accidentally switching applications on the track pad on the left side. I am left handed and I have been switching between apps on the track pad quite often. The performance seems very good. I have 9 tabs open in chrome, copying 25 gigs worth of photos off a usb drive, and downloading steam and several of the new style apps open and computer still seems pretty snappy. I also thought the machine would heat up, but it has stayed comfortably warm so far. I have not tired the on screen keyboard. I do not think that will be very useful. However, scrolling around web pages seems very natural w/ the touch screen. The metro apps also seem to work well with touch. One annoying thing so far. I bought the microsoft office product and it was not even fully installed. I had to dig out an included disc and type in the product key to get it up and running. So far so good. I have not found a reason so far to mess with resizing any UI elements. I am happy w/ the current resolution.

 

Sorry, I screwed up. Here is the attachment:

View attachment 89134

I'm not saying the laptop is unusually wide for being 16x9, I'm saying that 16x9 is inherently too wide. All my camera images have big black bars on the side, and there is not enough vertical space for stacking windows. That's why I got a little space back by moving the task bar to the right side of the screen.

The Beats audio is lousy. It's not just an equalizer, it includes all kinds of phase manipulations and other junk which makes the audio sound "wider" and "more dynamic" (read: distorted). Thankfully they have a configurable equalizer and allow you to turn Beats off. The Dolby V4 on the Yoga does a better job, although the HP still sounds better because it has better speakers (which isn't saying much!).

I'm really liking the touchscreen. When I'm lying on my couch with the laptop on my chest, scrolling (with my fingers on the back of the screen, thumb on front) and interacting with windows and icons is very natural. The touchpad is fine, but it requires you to move the mouse to a specific spot before doing something; with touch it's more direct. Touch is better optimized on Windows 8 than Windows 7.

I just wrote up a review of the HP Spectre XT TouchSmart Ultrabook at Amazon:
Amazon.com: William Wood "Bill"'s review of HP SPECTRE 15-4010nr 15.6-Inch Laptop (Sil...

Did anyone else get theirs? You can buy it on Amazon now as someone else noted, with 2 day delivery! A lot of people should have them by now...

 

The battery life is the killer, the rest looks fine. As far as I am concerned the retina display mbp 15 is the best 15" notebook on the market. It has full power cpus, powerful discreet graphics, ~ double the battery life of this envy of the ~3.5 ish hours reported on the site hold true, and worst of all, for all the additional power it has, it's LIGHTER than the envy spectre....

It's like they are not even trying to compete on the high end. I get the price differential, but I was hoping hp would try to shoot higher with this. Battery life is one of the paramount features that CANNOT be neglected, same as screen. They got the screen right here (retina resolution not needed, 1080p is MORE than enough on a 15") but no gpu option? low battery?

What is the point?

 

Touchscreen interface and Windows 8. rMPB has issues running Windows, right?

 

That price differential is huge and I am sure they know that. Apple owns the high end market. It's the Asus and Acer, and Lenovo, and Dell's that they are competing with in my opinion. . . And everybody remarked how high the price point was on this to begin with, but it does seem in line w/ the other recent touch screen laptops like the xps 12, acer s7, lenovo yoga, etc. I will gladly take my 15 inch screen and live with the battery life and enjoy this product. The discrete gpu would be nice, but you can definitely live without it.

 

Received mine today. The display is the highlight for me! Solid build quality and the keyboard is a pleasure to type on. I charged it up and unplugged. Without changing any power options, I have done some basic web surfing and installed Visual Studio. Looks like I will be getting a little more than 3 hours on my battery. Not an issue for me, but it might be for some.

 

That's a very helpful review - thanks for taking the time to post it!

 

I am in the market currently looking for a Windows 8 touch laptop. There are numerous options available like the Lenovo Yoga, Vaio Duo 11, Aspire S7, XPS12 but all these models have a lower configuration than I would like to have. I had finally shortlisted to buy the Dell New Inspiron 15z touch model which costs 1099$ but doesn't have a HD display. But it does have a dedicated 2GB Nvidia GPU. So which one is better? This Dell model or the HP Spectre XT TouchSmart Ultrabook 15t-4000 which costs more because of the screen but doesn't feature a dedicated GPU.

 

The screen on this laptop is one of its best features. I would say it depends on your use case. If you plan on playing a lot of games then that dedicated gpu on the dell would be better i think. I am no expert by any means. I do own the hp spectre touchsmart and I am loving it so far. It has a very sleek profile.

 

Another thing to look at is whether the Dell has an IPS screen which gives you the wide viewing angles without color shifting. This was important for me. The Intel graphics in the HP benchmark pretty well, not as good as a dedicated card though.

Christian Stella posted a link to an ICC profile he generated using the Spyder4 over at Amazon. This makes colors more accurate when viewing images. Definitely worth downloading it at:
Amazon.com: Christian Stella "author"'s review of HP SPECTRE 15-4010nr 15.6-Inch Laptop (Sil...

Has anyone with this laptop noticed when listening to music or video that the sound very briefly cuts out or buzzes slightly once in awhile? This is very annoying, I wonder if it's the Beats audio.

 

DEFINITELY do not get the dell!

I own that exact dell minus the touchscreen. It is crap! The battery life is approx 2 hours (I kid you not!). While the touchpad with buttons is awesome, the keyboard has no travel and is extremely uncomfortable to type on. And you CANNOT shut off the autoadjusting brightness option for the screen. I tried both of the fixes that are commonly posted online, and they didn't work. I called dell and after 3 hours of their tech guy on my computer, they claimed that I had a faulty lcd and motherboard and they'd replace those parts. ON A 3 DAY OLD COMPUTER. I laughed, and returned it to Costco and got the same one. The same problem. (and the same 2 hour battery life) I'm going to return this one tonight.

Avoid this model Dell!!!

 

I have had no issues with the sound cutting out. I did have quite a bit of static at first. Now that the speakers have been broken in a bit, they are sounding much better.

 

Many people are suggesting me to go for the XPS 12 or Yoga. Is this HP a better option that those?

 

I have the Yoga, it is very nice if you want a smaller screen at 13.3", or like the different viewing modes. I have heard that the Dell XPS 12 isn't as versatile in positions as the Yoga, and that its too easy to accidentally push the screen around the hinges when reaching out to touch it in laptop mode. It's also got a smaller screen than the Yoga.

The HP is faster and larger if that's what you want.

 

The XPS 12 doesn't have as many viewing modes as the Yoga, but it doesn't have the keyboard sticking out in the tablet mode. The XPS 12 has a smaller but Full HD screen, which the Yoga lacks. The Yoga doesn't have a backlit keyboard too, I guess.

 

Re the Yoga, the keyboard sticking out is a non-issue in practice. For a 13.3" screen, 1600x900 is perfect. You are right about it not having a backlit keyboard.

 

My issue with sound cutting out seems to be gone now.

 

Having recieved this computer, I can say that I am impressed with the overall craftsmanship. The screen is one of the best you can get hands down. i'm still evaluating the color profile. The colors didn't seem to be micalibrated just from glancing at a few comparison images. My laptop doesn't have any obvious defects which was surprising based on HP's past history. My Envy 14 didn't have a single defect either, so perhaps I'm HP's magic customer. You might think you have no reason to touch the screen of a laptop, but there are certain task (especially with windows 8) that make the touchscreen a very welcomed edition.

I haven't given the Laptop a thurough battery test just yet, so i'll save that for a follow-up post. This laptop has all the ports you'll need and it's very light. I've been using the Envy 14 for 2 years so i was a bit surprised by the width of this 15 inch thing of beauty. It's a little wider than a Macbook Pro, but not by much. Windows 8 flies on this PC (8GB of Ram and 256GB SSD). I think I'm goona swap the SSD out for one of the 512 variety, so i can load it up with Music.

XBOX music and video had some complaints on the Surface RT when released, but both work faily well on this laptop. I added my Windows Home Server Video folder to the Video Library and after the initial scan, the movies work like native files.

I've hesitated adding the Music folder from my Home Server. I think I want to clean things up a bit before having it scan and add 10,000 songs.

If I have any worries regarding this laptop, I'm interested in seeing how the finish holds up. It disipates heat pretty well and I hardly ever hear the fan, so I think the internals will last a while. I do wonder how that shiny chrome finish around the base is going to hold up. I also wish the finish was little darker to hide any future scuff marks like the smaller XTs finish.

 

What is the drive configuration? I've seen configurations with 256 SSD and a 512 5400 drive. The manuals talk about using the SSD as a cache, but it wasn't clear. I would prefer the drives to be treated separately so I can optimize performance as I like as well swapping out the 5400 rpm drive with another SSD.

thx, jim

 

I was speaking of adding a super fast Samsung SSD on my own. 256GB jut isn't large enough in my opinion. 512GB is the perfect size when you look at the current affordable prices. this laptop is great fro media listening and watching. The screen is top notch and when you pair the beats amp with a pair of external speakers, everything sounds amazing. I have a home server full of media but I'd like to be able to put a 1000 or so of my favorite songs and 50 of my favorite movies on here for my mobile travels. I'm a consultant so being able to use my laptop for everything (work and play) instead of my laptop and phone has it's advantages.

 

I think I forgot to answer your question. The configurations are SSD or a traditional drive with a small ssd drive as a quick cache for the OS and quick access files. I prefer a full SSD drive, but the Cache/Spinning Drive combo is a pretty good compromise if cost is important. After you load apps and files once, they should live in the cache most of the time for quick access. You can definitely get more drive space with the standard option. SSD drives are really fast and tend to last a while, so I prefer them to traditional drives. They are more expensive, but I'm willing to pay more to avoid wait times and hard drive hardware failures.