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The HP Spectre Foldable is one of the coolest PCs that I’ve reviewed in a while. It’s still one of the first foldable laptops to actually ship, with the first one ever being Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Fold. But HP’s Spectre Foldable feels a lot more mature.
The form factor makes a lot of sense, letting you choose between 12-, 14-, and 17-inch screen sizes, depending on how you’re using it at that time. Unlike other non-traditional solutions like the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i, the software doesn’t feel buggy.
The product isn’t without its share of issues though. For one thing, it costs $5,000. No one should buy it for that reason alone. It does come specced out at that price, but there’s also no 5G, a confusing omission for a device that’s designed to be taken on the road with you. Finally, the webcam is all wrong. It’ll actually be in portrait orientation if you’re using the big screen.
For a gen one product, I really love the HP Spectre Foldable. It’s not perfect, but no matter how good it is, no one should buy a $5,000 laptop. I’m thinking of this more as a proof of concept that HP can use to improve the second-gen model.
HP Spectre Foldable
The HP Spectre Fold is one of the newest Windows 11-powered foldable PCs. It can be used as a laptop, tablet, or even a desktop thanks to its big 17-inch foldable OLED display, which has a 4:3 aspect ratio and 2560×1920 resolution. It also has a Bluetooth keyboard and comes with an HP MPP 2.0 pen for versatile use.
Operating System
Windows 11 Home
CPU
12th-generation Intel Core i7-1250U
GPU
Integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics
RAM
16GB LPDDR5
Storage
1 TB PCIe NVMe SSD
Battery
6-cell, 94.3 Wh Li-ion polymer
Display (Size, Resolution)
17-inch 1920×2560 foldable OLED touch screen, 400 nits SDR brightness, 500 nits HDR brightness
Camera
HP True Vision 5MP IR webcam
Speakers
Quad Speakers tuned by Bang & Olufsen
Colors
Slate Blue
Ports
2x Thunderbolt 4 ports
Network
Intel Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3
Dimensions
Folded: 7.53×10.91×0.84 inches Unfolded 14.81×10.91×0.33 inches
Weight
3.58 lb (with keyboard); 2.99 lb (without keyboard)
Pros
- It folds
- The form factor is very versatile
- Audio quality is surprisingly good
- The keyboard has potential
Cons
- Bluetooth connectivity issues
- Webcam placement
- No 5G
- It costs $5,000
HP Spectre Foldable price and availability
The HP Spectre Foldable costs $5,000, and it’s available now from HP and Best Buy. There’s only one configuration, coming in with an Intel Core i7-1250U, 16GB RAM, and a 1TB SSD. The display is OLED, like with all foldables, and it has a resolution of 1920×2560. In the box, you’ll also find the Bluetooth keyboard and the pen.
Design
What it’s like to use a foldable-screen laptop
The HP Spectre Foldable is made out of magnesium, and in fact, it looks and feels a lot like the HP Dragonfly G4 as opposed to a Spectre. The color is the same Slate Blue, and it’s actually kind of easy to mistake one for the other. Of course, the Spectre Foldable has a smaller footprint and it’s thicker.
You’ll also find a kickstand on the back, letting you unfold the screen in its 17-inch glory and stand it up. It’s pretty great. I think this is the orientation that you’d use in a home office setting.
It’s also the way that I use it most frequently. If I’m traveling, it’s so convenient to have the compact Spectre Foldable in my bag and then open it up for the big 17-inch screen in a hotel room. Unfortunately, there’s really only one display angle. You can play with it a bit to stand it up more, but I’d like to see HP offer a tighter kickstand in the next-gen model.
There are three other modes, with the last one being the obvious 17-inch tablet that you can draw on and such. Laptop mode lets you use the HP Spectre Foldable folded at a 90-ish degree angle and the keyboard magnetically attached to the bottom half. There’s also something called 1.5 mode, where the keyboard is still magnetically attached, but slid down so that the touchpad is hanging off. This turns the 12.3-inch screen into a 14-inch vertically oriented screen.
There are a few interesting bits here. For one, the parts of the screen that are under the keyboard are turned off. This is the opposite of how Lenovo’s Yoga Book 9i worked, and it’s for the better. The Yoga Book 9i was a buggy implementation of an attachable keyboard; sometimes you’d open apps, and they’d actually launch under the keyboard. That won’t happen with the HP Spectre Foldable, which is a surprisingly bug-free experience.
Unlike other Windows PCs with unique form factors, the HP Spectre Foldable comes without compromises in the user experience.
Indeed, usually when it comes to Windows 11 and new form factors, there are lots of caveats. I’d find myself writing reviews saying things like, “This thing is great, as long as you don’t use your PC this way.†HP seems to have thought of everything here. The only real caveat on this product is it’s astronomical price tag.
One other thing it thought of is that it added some Snap Layouts, which make the 1.5 display work a little bit better. After all, a vertically oriented display isn’t super practical when the bottom few inches are folded at an angle, so you’ll want to be using that bottom portion for something else.
I really love the design of the HP Spectre Foldable, although it does irk me a little bit that it’s designed to look like a Dragonfly rather than a Spectre x360. But the product is surprisingly practical. When you hear about a foldable-screen laptop, you probably assume it’s a gimmick, but once I got my hands on it, I realized that this is a thing I want to be able to use everywhere.
Display
It’s a giant OLED screen
I’d say that the foldable display is the selling point of the Spectre Foldable, but I do believe that the 17-inch OLED screen makes a big difference over say, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold Gen 1. Indeed, LG, Asus, and Lenovo are all using larger panels now, and for good reason.
I already talked a bit about how the form factor allows for 17-, 14-, and 12-inch screen sizes, and how having that flexibility really offers a lot for the user experience. Let’s talk about quality.
In my testing, the screen supported 100% sRGB, 89% NTSC, 91% Adobe RGB, and 100% P3, which is better than almost any LCD I’ve tested, but a bit under what I’ve seen from OLED displays. That’s nothing to worry about though. Obviously, foldable panels are a bit different.
Brightness maxed out at 424.7 nits, and the black level stayed at 0.01 regardless of what the brightness was set to.
Another thing I want to talk about is the webcam, which is very awkwardly placed. Don’t get me wrong; the 5MP sensor is fantastic. Indeed, I really think that if you want the best webcam on a laptop, you should buy an HP.
Here’s the problem. If you’re using the Spectre Foldable full-screen with the kickstand, the webcam is on the side. Not only is the placement very awkward, but your video will be portrait orientation as well. To me, this was the position that the device was in when I was working at home, the desktop replacement. It’s hard to call it that when the webcam is unusable for work calls.
The solution, of course, is to use an external webcam. As far as how HP could solve the issue, that’s for it to figure out. The next-gen model could have two webcams, or it can have one with a square lens so that it can handle both portrait and landscape orientations. Perhaps it can use a sensor with a high enough resolution so that it can just crop the field of view and the placement won’t feel awkward.
Either way, for this generation of the product, the webcam is a definitely drawback to its flexibility.
Keyboard
Quality keyboard, poor Bluetooth
The most surprising thing about the HP Spectre Foldable is just how pleasant it is to use, and that includes the keyboard. With the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i, there’s no really practical way to carry the keyboard, and when in laptop mode, the touchpad is still using the touchscreen. With the ThinkPad X1 Fold Gen 1, the keyboard conveniently fit inside the device, but it was small and of average quality.
The keyboard that comes with the Spectre Foldable is a delight to type on, and it also fits inside the device when closed. HP specifically said that it put a lot of effort into making the keyboard as good as it is on laptops, a challenge on something that thin. But it did it, and frankly, if you’re charging $5,000, you can’t compromise on a core PC experience like keyboard quality.
For something so compact, keyboard quality is shockingly good.
The keyboard charges wirelessly while it’s magnetically attached in laptop mode or when the device is folded closed. That means that you pretty much never have to worry about charging it; in fact, the same goes for the pen when it’s docked with the front magnet. There are some caveats to that though. When the keyboard is slid down to 1.5 mode, it won’t charge. It has to be fully docked. There’s also a magnet on the side for convenient pen storage, and it won’t charge there either.
Notably, the keyboard has a charging port, and it comes with a little cable for it. If you use the HP Spectre Foldable in full-screen mode all the time and the keyboard never gets a chance to charge in there, you can use that, even though it will take months to drain the battery.
I did have keyboard issues though. I experienced a lot of double-typing, and HP sent me a new unit where I had some serious Bluetooth connectivity issues. Honestly, it’s not a huge deal. At $5,000, I’m not recommending that anyone actually purchase this thing, so I’m happy to relax and marvel at how comfortable this keyboard is to type on.
Performance
12th-gen Intel U9 is fine
The HP Spectre Foldable only comes in one configuration, and the CPU included is an Intel Core i7-1250U. That’s a 12th-gen 9W chip with 10 cores, including two P-cores and eight E-cores. The reason that HP didn’t use a 13th-gen CPU is because Intel never released 13th-gen 9W processors, and with 14th-gen on the horizon, it seems that it’s not going to.
12th-gen U9 is fine for productivity. I don’t recommend using this for photo editing, let alone video editing or gaming. This is a machine that’s made for people on the go that can make use of the variety of form factors, although given the use case, the omission of 5G seems odd. But I digress. For what you’d use this for, the Core i7-1250U is fine. And frankly, since the Spectre Foldable feels more like a proof of concept that demonstrates that HP can make an awesome foldable PC, I’m sure the next-gen model will use a CPU that’s even better.
| 2,143 / 6,734 |
2,247 / 7,830 |
2,530 / 9,108 |
| 90 / 353 |
1,734 / 6,477 |
|
| 4,301 / 4,176 |
5,474 / 4,745 |
5,480 / 5,097 |
| 1,154 |
1,819 |
1,737 |
| 1,339 |
1,471 |
1,572 |
I chose the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i and the HP Dragonfly G4 to compare it to because I think they’re the closest competitors. The Yoga Book 9i is a unique dual-screen laptop, so it has similar form factors, like I’ve mentioned throughout this review. And the Dragonfly G4 is just such a similar product. Like I said in the design section, it’s hard to believe that this is a Spectre because it looks and feels so much like a Dragonfly. It’s just that the HP Dragonfly is a traditional 13.5-inch laptop; however, it is offered with 5G connectivity, something that HP strangely omitted on a foldable laptop that’s intended for people to take on the road.
It’s not surprising that both the Yoga Book 9i and the Dragonfly G4 beat the Spectre Foldable in every benchmark test. These products have 15W 13th-gen processors, compared to the Spectre Foldable’s 9W 12th-gen chip. Naturally, this form factor does call for a lower wattage chip. In fact, the first Windows foldables used Intel Lakefield chips, which were just awful, so a lot of progress has been made.
However, I do need to point out that the LG Gram Fold includes a 15W 13th-gen processor, so it is technically possible. I haven’t tested it out personally though, so I don’t know how it handles things like thermals.
Should you buy the HP Spectre Foldable?
You should buy the HP Spectre Foldable if:
- You own a tequila company called Tres Comas
- You are the eldest boy
- You work for a company that’s called “{your last name} Capitalâ€
You should NOT buy the HP Spectre Foldable if:
- You thought Mr Potter was the villain in It’s a Wonderful Life
- It’s not feasible for you to become Batman due to financial constraints
- Seeing Scrooge McDuck diving into his pool of money doesn’t seem totally normal to you
In case you don’t get the pop culture references, you shouldn’t buy the HP Spectre Foldable unless $5,000 means nothing to you. That’s not a knock on the product, of course. The product is phenomenal. But again, this is a $5,000 laptop. You can buy two of the best laptops on the market for that price.
If you’re actually looking for a laptop to buy, go check out the HP Spectre x360, or even the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i, which is 60% less expensive. If you really want a foldable screen, just wait for the next one. I have no doubt that it will be more refined and that it will be cheaper.
** (Disclaimer: This video content is intended for educational and informational purposes only) **
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