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 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.

Tags: Notebook, Mobile, HP, laptop, Hewlett-Packard, x360, Ultrabook, Broadwell, spectre

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com