HP Envy 14 Spectre

Positive: The HP Envy 14 Spectre has a unique glass-covered design and packs a lot of features into a slim 14-inch ultrabook body, plus its multitouch response is great for a Windows laptop.

Negative: It's expensive, especially considering the standard components, and feels heavier than it should. The glass wrist rest can be awkward.

Outcome: The first big high-design laptop of 2012, the HP Envy 14 Spectre is a bold experiment that largely succeeds, if you're willing to pay a premium for it.

The new HP Envy 14 Spectre is at least off to a strong start, having been one of the new products with the most buzz at CES 2012, and winning our Computers and Hardware category Best of CES award. It has so many built-in talking points, it's like a crib sheet for nearly every hot current gadget topic. First, it's an ultrabook--that very hot Intel designation for a new generation of thin but powerful laptops. On top of that, it's one of the very first 14-inch ultrabooks, although it's a bit thicker and heavier than the ultrabook name would lead you to expect. The design, while unique, is most notable for its use of Corning's scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass not only on the edge-to-edge display, but also covering the entire back of the lid, as well as the wrist rest. Finally, it incorporates an NFC receiver for wireless data transfer with compatible mobile phones (using a free Android app). For a starting price of $1,399 you might reasonably expect more than the Envy 14 Spectre's Intel Core i5, integrated Intel HD3000 graphics, and a 128GB solid-state drive (SSD), specs you can find in a decent thin 13-inch ultrabook for around $899. There's clearly a design premium here, not unlike what Apple, Sony, and others have been working into the prices of high-end systems for years. To be fair, very few laptop users are doing anything that requires a Core i7 CPU, and you probably aren't one of them, but a bigger SSD, let's call it the new over-$1,000 standard, should be included. As it is, on the Envy 14 upgrading a 256GB SSD costs an extra $300. Despite this, the Envy 14 Spectre experience ends up being exactly what it was meant to be. It's practical, while still being fun to use and fun to show off, and its glass-covered construction makes it feel just a little like an artifact from the near future, dropped through a wormhole in time to show up all those anonymous-looking grey boxes. 

Almost anyone who sees the HP Envy 14 Spectre immediately compares it to something. For many, it's the Apple MacBook Pro. From the open position, the interior certainly has that look, aside from the transparent raised wrist rest. To others, the glass back looks like a tablet or slate. The keyboard is similar to ones seen on other recent high-end HP laptops. The company calls it a radiance backlit keyboard, which means that the keys light up when you're using them, and dim to save battery life when idle. The large glass touch pad is reminiscent of the Apple trackpad, but also other all-in-one clickpads that have been turning up in Windows laptops over the past year or so. The left and right mouse button functions are built into the bottom corners of the pad itself--I much prefer the Apple model of a two-finger tap for a right mouse button click. One interesting feature is the built-in NFC antenna, even though near-field communication is hardly mentioned in HP's promotional materials, and you'd have to find a tiny system tray icon to even know it was available on this laptop. Hypothetically, this would allow you to simply place your smartphone on the wrist rest and sync or exchange data. Right now, the applications seem more limited.