HP Spectre x360 2-in-1 Australian Review (2024)

HP has greatly impressed us with its ultraportable, consumer (and business-grade) laptops in the past. Now, here’s the latest version of its Spectre x360 2-in-1 convertible. It’s a premium, consumer-grade laptop that seeks to be the work-focused ultraportable of choice. It’s been available overseas for some time but, now it’s here, how does it fare in the current market?

HP Spectre x360 2-in-1 Specs

Features, Ergonomics and Design

I keep having to remind myself that HP’s Spectre brand isn’t a business-class ultraportable. That’s because the (recycled) aluminium chassis feels very sturdy, well-made and luxurious, to boot. The range doesn’t undergo the exhaustive testing that HP’s business-grade laptops go through, but it’s still up there with the other, best-made consumer laptops on the market.

The Spectre’s 14-inch, OLED screen has a high, 2,880 x 1,800 resolution and displays a crisp and clear Windows Desktop with vibrant colours. The glossy surface means it’s potentially prone to reflections when dark content is displayed but, at the same time, a non-reflective coating somewhat ameliorates this issue more with other OLED laptops. It’s also TÜV Eyesafe-Certified for eye-friendly, low blue light.

The Spectre x360’s screen is also HDR compatible which means multimedia has the potential to look very impressive. The vibrant colours are augmented by top-notch contrast and both colourful and monochromatic transitions are rendered smooth and step free. That said, as I recently saw with it’s game-oriented sibling, the Omen Transcend 14, bright areas can sometimes see details blow out.

The screen also can be set (automatically or forced) to 48Hz or 60Hz to save power and 120Hz for speed. The latter combines with the quick, OLED pixel response time to render fast-moving objects with impressive smoothness. Competitive FPS players might object but most gamers won’t gripe.

Being a 2-in-1 convertible means the x360 has a touchscreen and it’s very responsive. The hinge is impressively robust and it does a fine job of folding backwards to create a solid-feeling tablet that doesn’t easily flop apart. It’s stylus compatible but that comes as a $140 optional extra.

The twin speakers don’t have their specs detailed, but we know they’ve been tuned by HP’s HyperX brand and that they sound brilliant. Fidelity is good from the top to the bottom end and there’s punchy bass, to boot.

Above the screen is a very impressive, high-resolution 1,440p webcam. It does a great job of fending-off grain in low light and it supports Windows Hello facial-recognition log-in too.

The white-backlit keyboard is a very-well-weighted, Scrabble-tile unit that’s comfy and accurate to type upon for extended periods. The up-and-down arrow keys are squished, but that’s our only issue with it. Note, that there’s no CoPilot button, but I feel that’s only an issue for CoPilot+ laptops… at present.

The trackpad feels high quality and is very smooth and accurate and the buttons have a perfectly weighted, low-noise actuation.

All in all, the HP Spectre x360 2-in-1 is great to interact with.

Connectivity and Ports

Inside there’s Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. I’d prefer Wi-Fi 7 and maybe another USB port, but what’s there is quick and useful.

Features, Ergonomics and Design Score: 4.1 / 5

Performance

Inside HP’s Spectre x360 2-in-1 is a (Meteor Lake) 1.4 – 4.8GHz Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor which has six Performance cores, eight Efficiency cores and two, Low Power Efficiency cores. It also has integrated, 2.25GHz, octa-core, Intel Arc graphics. This is all backed up by 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM and a 1TB NVMe hard drive.

In the general computing, PCMark 10 benchmark, which uses all components of the system, the Spectre scored an impressive 6,761 which is above average for any laptop. (Score: 3 / 5)

In the Cinebench rendering tests, it scored 1,714 in the rapid R15 test and 9,578 in the longer, 10-minute R23 test. These aren’t particularly high scores but they still demonstrate enough oomph for occasional rendering tasks. (Score: 1.8 / 5)

In our 3DMark gaming tests, the Spectre wouldn’t run the tricky, ray-tracing benchmarks, Port Royal and Time Spy.

It did run the AAA-gaming-title-mimicking Time Spy and Fire Strike Extreme tests. Here, it scored 3,513 (average 19.7fps) and 3,875 (average 17.5fps) respectively. While these aren’t quite playable frame rates, some judicious dropping of the resolution and settings will push the Spectre over the smooth-gaming threshold for mainstream games.

In the lesser, 3DMark Night Raid test, the HP scored 24,758 which is an average of 163.2fps, so, it will happily play casual and competitive games and they’ll work well with the quick screen… not bad for a work-oriented ultraportable.

3D Performance Score: 1.5 / 5

I also ran benchmarks which will be folded into our reviews in 2025. But, for now, here they are for reference:

UL Procyon Microsoft Office: 6,213
UL Procyon Adobe Photoshop: 4,523
UL Procyon Adobe Premiere: 3,352
UL Procyon Ai Vision (CPU): 78
UL Procyon Ai Vision (GPU): 98
3DMark Steel Nomad: 670 (6.7fps)
3DMark Solar Bay: 10,010

Cooling

The cooling system is impressive. The Spectre x360 rarely gets more than warm when under load and the fan rarely gets higher than a very-low whoosh, even when set to Performance mode. It’s usually silent.

Furthermore, in our longer, 30-minute Cinebench R23 test, it scored 2.4 per cent higher(!) than in the usual, ten-minute test, so there’s definitely no thermal throttling on show.

Portability and Battery Life

The HP Spectre x360 2-in-1 weighs just 1.44KG and the power supply and cables only add 309g more to the mix.

You won’t need to carry the latter around much either as the Spectre ran our PCMark 10 Modern Office benchmark for an impressive 17 hours – that’s more than two days out of the office.

I also ran UL’s Procyon Microsoft Office-based battery test and the Spectre lasted for 15 hours and 41 minutes.

Build quality is excellent and I fully expect it to (easily) survive life on the road.

Portability and Battery Life Score: 3.8 / 5

Price and Value

HP’s Spectre x360 2-in-1 costs $3,848 which reflects its premium credentials. Still, it’s good value and, if you’re quick, you can get it from Harvey Norman for a good discount, at $2,988.

Price: 2.2 / 5

Value: 3.5 / 5

Conclusion

The 2024 HP Spectre x360 2-in-1 is a very good ultraportable laptop with few weaknesses. It’s great to interact with, work upon and even game upon to a limited degree. The glossy screen slightly dents its business chops, but enhances it multimedia prowess in return. The fact it doubles as a tablet, is icing on the cake. It’s a great laptop and, with the enhanced value score derived from the current discount (which boosts the overall rating to 4 / 5), it’s a worthy winner of our Recommended award.

Overall: 3.7 / 5

Last Updated on 26 April 2025 by Nick Ross