It carries a brand-new Core M Skylake, and that's about it

Oct 7, 2015 13:20 GMT  ·  By

The Spectre x360 is a sleek-looking Skylake-powered convertible notebook that becomes a tablet when you push the 13.3-inch screen all the way to the back 360 degrees.

What's nice about the new 2-in-1 from HP is that it comes with an aluminum body instead of the traditional plastic, which is about 0.6 inches thick. The new HP x360 is basically a refresh of the original Spectre x360 that launched earlier this year and that featured an Intel Broadwell processor. The new model obviously had to be updated, HP giving it a beefy Intel Core i5 and Core i7 Skylake processor options, probably from the Core M series.

According to Liliputing, specs-wise, the new Spectre x360 comes with a screen of 1920 x 1080 pixel or 2560 x 1440 pixel display, it has 8GB of RAM and has up to 256GB of SSD storage. Entry-level models have a full HD screen, 4GB of RAM and a pretty unimpressive 128GB SSD drive.

HP's new Spectre is supposed to fight Microsoft's 2-in-1s?

Ports-wise, each model comes with a full-sized HDMI and a mini DisplayPort, which is nice since you can plug 4K screens to it and play movies, and three USB 3.0 ports including one that can charge devices when the 2-in-1 sleeps.

The keyboard is backlit for all models. HP believes the new Spectre x360 can stay up for 13 hours and 15 minutes, which is a pretty precise assessment and also probably inaccurate, but keeping in mind that this is a 3.2-pound notebook with a Core i5or even i7, it's pretty impressive.

The new Spectre x360 isn't bad for a price tag starting at $300, but customers would probably want something a bit better even if it would cost a bit more. Since the entry-level model comes with a tiny-for-nowadays 128GB, it surely won't be a favorite among customers, and while the Spectre doesn't carry any dedicated graphics card on any model, it won't come as a surprise if people would rather pay bigger bucks on Microsoft's latest Surface Book portable powerhouse.