A sleek machine for the upwardly mobile

As an ultrabook, it is built for high mobility, weighing just 1.39 kg and a mere 14.5mm thick. Supporting that mobility, it comes with 256 gigabytes of solid state storage and has up to five hours of battery life.

It looks good with a 13.3-inch HD display and a slim bezel line. Despite being so skinny, it has a full array of ports, including Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0 and HDMI. Another nice feature of the ultrabook is the back-lit keyboard, making it convenient to type in a dark room.

The SpectreXT is powered by 3rd generation Intel Core i5-3317U 1.7GHz and it is equipped with 4 GB DDR3 RAM.

With the ultrafast mSATA solid state drive and Intel Rapid Start Technology, the ultrabook has very fast boot and resume times from sleep mode. During the test, I found that it took only about 8 seconds to be ready for use in the Start or home screen.

The SpectreXT comes with Intel Smart Connect Technology, which automatically updates email while the notebook is in sleep mode. So, you can save the battery when the ultrabook fetches emails for you.

Music lovers will be pleased that the SpectreXT features Beats Audio technology, which produces rich sound quality over the provided quad speakers and via premium headphones. I tested it with my Sony premium in-ear headphones and was impressed in the music quality. The quad speakers sounded very good while playing games during the test.

The SpectreXT also comes with HP Imagepad that provides precise multi-finger touch and gesture navigation. The Imagepad is very useful when used with Windows 8’s intuitive navigation. For example, I could use two fingers to scroll the Start screen to the left or the right or scroll a scrollable window up and down.

The Spectre XT 13-2107TU has good performance. Games and business applications ran fast. Web pages were also rendered fast and video clips played smoothly.

Windows 8 had changes its performance scoring system to a scale from 1.0 to 9.9, compared to the 1.0 to 7.9 of Windows 7.

I measured the performance of the SpectreXT with the Windows 8 benchmark tool and found that it got good scores in most categories.

The ultrabook got a very high score of 8.1 for its disk data transfer rate and 6.9 points for its processor’s calculations per second performance.

It got 5.9 points for memory operations per second, 6.4 points for 3D business and gaming graphics and 5.5 points for desktop graphic performance, which surprised me as I found it ran graphics games fast and smoothly. For example, the Pinball FX2, which is a free app from Microsoft for Windows 8, was smooth.

Of course, being an ultrabook, it’s not cheap. HP SpectreXT 13-2107TU has a starting price of Bt42,990, VAT included.

        

Key specs:

_ OS: Windows 8 64

_ Processor: 3rd generation Intel Core i5-3317U 1.7GHz

_ Memory: 4 GB DDR3 RAM

_ Storage: 256GB (Solid State Drive Flash Module)

_ Optical drive: none

_ Display: 13.3-inch HD BrightView LED- backlit Display (1366 x 768)

_ Webcam: HP TrueVision HD 

_ Network interface: 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN

_ Wireless: Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6235 WLAN 802.11a/b/g/n and Bluetooth

_ Battery: 4 Cell Lithium Ion Battery with up to 5-hour battery life

_ Ports: 1 SuperSpeed USB 3.0; 1 USB 2.0; 1 HDMI; 1 headphone-out; 1 microphone-in; 1 Mini DisplayPort

_ Dimensions: 316.5 x 224.5 x 14.5-17.7mm

_ Weight: 1.395kgs