We go hands-on with the Spectre Folio!

We’re currently in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for HP’s Home Planet 2018 media conference, where the company has officially announced their most luxurious convertible ever for South East Asia, the Spectre Folio.

Made with real leather, the Spectre Folio is one of the most luxurious notebooks we’ve ever tried. While leather-bound notebooks aren’t new, HP’s implementation of the concept is considerably better than the notebooks that has come before it.

Are you talking about real leather?

Yeah, real, came-from-a-dead-animal leather. The Spectre Folio’s externals is made from the same leather that’s used on other premium leather products like bags and shoes.

To fit the electronic bits, HP has integrated a magnesium frame into the body of the Spectre Folio. Because of the nature of the convertible, HP had to get creative with the hardware they stuck inside of it, and as a result the Spectre Folio uses the smallest motherboard available for Intel’s 8th Generation, Amber Lake-Y Core i7 processor. Since we’re already on the hardware, the Spectre Folio also comes with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD storage.

The screen is a 13.3-inch, full HD touchscreen display that can be pulled and pushed to transform the Spectre Folio from a traditional notebook, to a specialized media mode down to a tablet.

While the Spectre Folio doesn’t do traditional “tent mode”, the media mode where the keyboard is covered is far better at giving you an uncluttered view when watching movies or video, since the trackpad is left uncovered. This way you can still use it to navigate through menus and such without having to lay your hands on the display, smudging it up with your fingerprints.

As for actual use, the Spectre Folio felt pretty solid despite its versatility. The keyboard feels good to type on, has 1.5mm travel and doesn’t have the squishy, mushy keys that you typically associate with devices like it. The notebook balances well in our lap, and the display snapped into place quickly as we transformed it from notebook to media mode to tablet.

The Spectre Folio comes with a pressure-sensitive stylus as well, with 4000 levels of sensitivity. It’s an obvious add-on to the Folio that’s meant to attract designers and other creatives towards the Spectre Folio, people who are more likely to pay an added premium for a leather-bound notebook.

Unfortunately the Spectre Folio isn’t slated to launch in the Philippines as of yet, though that’s still expected to change in the next few months.