HP Spectre X360 Ultrabook Review: Sleek, Sexy, Convertible

Name: HP Spectre X360 Ultrabook: Sleek, Sexy, Convertible
Brand: HP

by Marco Chiappetta — Sunday, March 01, 2015, 02:00 PM EDT

Battery Life

Battery life is one of the more important considerations when contemplating and ultrabook. A system might have a impeccable construction and beautiful screen, but that doesn't mean much if you can't use it for very long on the go...

Battery Eater Pro and Web Browsing Tests

Battery Life Testing

We run two tests to give you a sense of how long the system will last under light and heavy use. Our web browsing test is a light-use scenario in which we refresh a webpage every 3 - 5 minutes, over a WiFi connection, until the battery is exhausted. The Battery Eater Pro test then gives the laptop a much heavier workload to simulate the kind of stress you might put on the machine with multiple resources engaged, including CPU, GPU, memory and hard drive.

The HP Spectre X360 offered the longest battery life we have seen in a thin-and-light ultrabook to date. In both the stressful Battery Eater Pro test and our custom Web Browsing test, the Spectre X360 led the pack. The machine didn't quite live up to the 12.5 hour claim HP made, but 9.5 hours in our test was still good enough to beat all of the competition.

The Spectre X360 achieved this feat in a couple of ways. First, the clean software installation helps. HP also optimized every component it could for power, including the LEDs used in the system. And that relatively large 56wHr battery obviously plays a big part as well.