At the risk of splitting hairs, or numbers, the HP Specter x360 13.5 (starts at $1,149.99; $1,749.99 as tested) is not an all-new convertible laptop but an update of the Specter x360 14 that scored PCMag Editors’ Choice honors in January 2021 It has the same 13.5-inch OLED touch screen with 3,000-by-2,000-pixel resolution, refreshed with 12th Generation Intel silicon. The new HP easily earns another Editors’ Choice win as a premium 2-in-1, although the contest is awfully close between it and another high-end consumer convertible with a dazzling OLED display, the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 7. It comes down to whether you prefer the Spectre’s squarish 3:2 screen aspect ratio or the Yoga’s more rectangular 16:10.
An Eighth of an Ounce Over the Line
At 3.01 pounds, only a grinch would say the Specter x360 13.5 misses our cutoff to be an ultraportable; the Yoga 9i is a quarter-pound heavier. Clad in Natural Silver aluminum ($10 extra for Nightfall Black or Nocturne Blue), the HP measures 0.67 by 11.7 by 8.7 inches. In contrast, a 14-inch convertible with the familiar 16:9 widescreen ratio, the Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga Gen 2, is 0.67 by 12.6 by 8.5 inches.
The $1,149.99 base model at HP.com pairs an Intel Core i5-1235U processor with a 1,920-by-1,280-pixel IPS touch screen, along with 8GB of RAM and a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive. A version of that display with an integrated privacy filter is $40 more. Our $1,749.99 test unit is a Best Buy config with a Core i7-1255U chip (two Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 12 threads); what HP calls a “3K2K” OLED panel; doubled memory (16GB) and storage (1TB); and Windows 11 Pro instead of Home.
Although a bit less wedge-shaped than previous models, the x360 13.5 preserves Specter trademarks such as contrasting brass accents and diagonal-cut rear corners that hold ports (the audio jack at left rear, a USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 port on the right ). There’s also a USB 3.2 Type-A port on the left edge and a second Thunderbolt 4 port and microSD card slot on the right. The AC adapter has a USB-C plug; Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth handle wireless connections.
An HDMI port for connecting an external monitor is an obvious omission, which HP partially offsets by bundling a USB-C mini-dock in the box. (The dock has an HDMI output, plus two USB-A ports.) You also get a carrying sleeve and HP’s Rechargeable MPP 2.0 Tilt Pen, a 5.5-inch stylus with two buttons and a USB-C port for charging. The pen clings magnetically to the side of the screen.
It’s difficult to open the lid with one hand, but otherwise the Specter x360 13.5 is a delight to hold and tote, slim yet solidly built with virtually no flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck. The bezels are thin (HP boasts a 90% screen-to-body ratio), and a face-recognition webcam and fingerprint reader—the latter replacing the right Control key—provide two ways to skip typing passwords with Windows Hello.
A Clever Camera
The 5-megapixel webcam provides well-lit, sharp, and colorful selfies. It offers a choice of three high-resolution aspect ratios—16:9 (2,560 by 1,440 pixels), 4:3 (2,560 by 1,920), or 3:2 (2,560 by 1,706)—as well as capturing 1080p videos at 30fps. A top-row key on the keyboard disables the camera, as indicated by both a key LED and tiny diagonal lines across the lens. The webcam offers backlighting correction, an appearance filter to remove blemishes, and auto frame to let you move around (within reason) during conference calls. An HP Enhanced Lighting app mimics onscreen the effect of a ring light.
Another top-row key launches HP Command Center, which combines the aforementioned webcam extras (GlamCam) with network traffic optimization and automatic or manual cooling fan control. (We used the Performance mode, which remained pleasantly quiet, for our benchmark tests.) A Focus Mode option dims all but the active application window to eke out a bit more battery life.
Speaking of keys, the keyboard is brightly backlit and has an exceedingly comfortable, snappy typing feel. We’re disappointed it no longer has the right-hand column of dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys found in the Specter x360 14, and that it follows HP’s annoying policy of placing the cursor arrow keys in a clumsy row —with half-size, hard-to-hit up and down arrows stacked between left and right—instead of the correct inverted T. The large, buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly and takes just the right amount of pressure for a quiet click.
Quad speakers pump out crisp and clear sound, short on bass but with fine highs and midtones. It’s easy to make out overlapping tracks. Bang & Olufsen Audio Control software provides music, movie, and voice presets and an equalizer, as well as microphone noise cancellation for single or multiple speakers.
The OLED screen is simply stunning, with rich, deep, and vibrant colors and stark contrast. White backgrounds are pristine instead of dingy, and contrast is off the charts. Even the finest details are sharp, with no pixelation to be seen. Viewing angles are broad, although the touch glass picks up reflections at extreme angles, and brightness is ample. HP Display Control software lets you choose sRGB, DCI-P3, Adobe RGB, or default color modes.
The 3:2 aspect ratio is the closest available to a pad of paper in tablet mode, and the provided pen offers great palm rejection, 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity, and tilt control. It kept up with my fastest swipes and scribbles.
HP equips the Specter x360 13.5 with an array of utilities including Photo Match, which uses AI to scan your image collection for a face; HP QuickDrop, to transfer pics and files between the PC and your phone; the Concepts drawing and sketching app; and Adobe Creative Cloud, McAfee LiveSafe, LastPass, and ExpressVPN trials.
Testing the Specter x360 13.5: Joining an Elite Productivity Group
For our benchmark comparisons, we compared the new Specter to other premium laptops in the 14-inch neighborhood. Lenovo’s Yoga 9i Gen 7, as mentioned, is its most direct competitor. The Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio is a 14.4-inch hybrid of a different design, with a game-worthy GPU and a higher price ($2,699 as tested).
Two others hail from the business rather than consumer aisle: the Asus ExpertBook B7 Flip 2-in-1 and the lone non-convertible in the group, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10, included as the ultimate 14-inch ultraportable. You can see their basic specs in the table below.
Productivity Tests
The main benchmark of UL’s PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10’s Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop’s storage.
Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our final productivity test is Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The Asus was an underachiever, while the Specter collected a bunch of silver and bronze medals, showing excellent productivity performance. It easily surpassed the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate a strong Microsoft Office or Google Workspace platform, and it tied the Yoga 9i in Photoshop—their OLED screens make both superb image editing workstations.
Graphics Tests
We test Windows PCs’ graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
The Surface Laptop Studio’s Nvidia GPU is in a league of its own against the other systems’ Intel integrated graphics, but the HP and its peers are fine for casual gaming and streaming entertainment.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptops’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of SteelTears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candles per square meter).
The Specter x360 13.5 won our battery marathon with more than 15 hours of unplugged life, so a full day of work or school plus an evening of Netflix or Spotify will be no sweat. It is rivaled only by the Yoga for brilliant, vivid color; its measured screen brightness fell a bit short of the 400 nits we look for in a high-end laptop, but the super-high contrast of OLED technology makes that much less of a problem than it would be for an IPS panel.
Verdict: One Elegant, Classy Convertible
As we said, Lenovo’s Yoga 9i is a tough competitor to the Specter with an equally admirable OLED display. We’re sad that neither of them has an HDMI port nor a niche or slot to hold the stylus, although the HP wins points for its bundled mini docking station and magnetically attached pen.
Your choice will come down to screen shape—and in our eyes, just as seeing an OLED screen spoils you for an IPS panel, enjoying a tall 3:2 display spoils you for a more conventional view. The HP Specter x360 13.5 is our new favorite 2-in-1.
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