HP Spectre x360 16 Review

We began 2021 by raving about the HP Spectre x360 14, a 13.5-inch convertible laptop with a gorgeous OLED touch screen. Now it's the spring of 2022 and HP has upped the ante: The Spectre x360 16 (starts at $1,249.99; $2,029.99 as tested) has a larger, higher-resolution OLED touch panel, as well as faster performance and fancier features. It's inevitably heavier and more expensive than its predecessor, but it's a tempting pen-friendly platform for multimedia editors and digital content creators.

The Design: Those Trademark Diagonal Corners 

While laptops with 16-inch, 16:10 aspect ratio displays are increasingly popular, the Spectre x360 16 is the first we've seen that's a convertible. The HP is no bulkier than its clamshell cousins, measuring 0.78 by 14.1 by 9.7 inches (HWD) versus 0.74 by 14.2 by 10.2 inches for the Asus Vivobook Pro 16X OLED and 0.78 by 14.1 by 10.3 inches for the Acer ConceptD 5. It lands between the two in weight at 4.45 pounds (the Asus is 4.19 and the Acer 5.4 pounds) and has the creative advantage of not only coming with a stylus pen but folding into a tablet for sketching and annotating—on your lap or desk, since it's too hefty to hold in front of you.

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(Photo: Molly Flores)

The HP has a quad-core, 3.4GHz (5.0GHz turbo) Intel Core i7-11390H processor and 16GB of RAM. The $1,249.99 base model at HP.com features a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics, and an IPS display with 3,072-by-1,920-pixel resolution. Our test unit, model 16-f0023dx, is a $2,029.99 Best Buy configuration with a 1TB SSD plus Intel Optane buffer, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 GPU, and a 3,840-by-2,400-pixel OLED touch screen. 

The design is slightly tamer than we've seen from previous Spectre laptops, but the x360 16 is still an elegant aluminum slimline with beveled edges (black with silver accents, in this case) and classy diagonal-cut rear corners. It feels solid, with no flex if you grasp the screen corners or mash the keyboard, and only a little wobble if you tap the display in laptop mode. The keyboard integrates a fingerprint reader and special top-row functions including not only brightness and volume, but also keys to mute the microphone and disable the webcam.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Besides coming with a carrying sleeve and a rechargeable tilt pen that clings magnetically (if weakly) to the side of the screen, the HP has a decent set of ports. On the left side, you'll find an HDMI video output, a USB 3.2 Type-A port with a drop-down partial cover (like some skinny notebooks' Ethernet ports), and an audio jack in the rear corner.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

At right are a microSD card slot, the AC adapter connector, and two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi 6E handle wireless connections; LTE mobile broadband is not available.

A Spiffy OLED Screen, and a Fancy Camera 

OLED displays offer unbeatably brilliant colors, sky-high contrast, and India-ink blacks, and the HP's is no exception. The 4K touch screen delivers plenty of brightness and pristine white backgrounds. Hues pop like poster paints, and fine details are razor-sharp. An HP Display Control pop-up lets you switch among default, native, sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color modes. The 5.5-inch pen has two buttons and a hidden USB-C port for charging; it kept up with my fastest swipes and scribbles with good palm rejection.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Speakers flanking the keyboard produce sound that's not particularly loud but quite clear and not tinny, harsh, or hollow. Bass is minimal, but you can make out overlapping tracks. Bang & Olufsen Audio Control software provides noise cancellation; music, movie, and voice presets; and an equalizer with pop, jazz, country, and other settings. 

In addition to the fingerprint reader, the webcam offers IR face recognition, giving you two ways to skip passwords with Windows Hello. The high-res camera captures 2,560-by-1,440- or 2,560-by-1,920-pixel images with minimal static and accurate colors, and a GlamCam panel in the HP Command Center utility adds intelligent enhancements such as waking or locking the system as you approach or walk away; dimming the display to save battery power when you look elsewhere; and warning if you're too close to the screen or someone is looking over your shoulder. 

GlamCam also offers lighting correction and can automatically center your face in the frame, with a Beauty Mode to airbrush out facial flaws (I didn't see much difference) and HP Enhanced Lighting to put an illuminated ring around you.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Like every other HP laptop I've seen (except for one), the Spectre's keyboard arranges the cursor arrow keys in a clumsy row instead of the correct inverted T, with hard-to-hit, half-size up and down arrows stacked between full-size left and right. But it has real Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys instead of making you pair the Fn and arrow keys; bright backlighting; and a fairly good (though slightly shallow or wooden) typing feel. The buttonless touchpad glides and taps easily and takes just the right amount of pressure for a quiet click. 

The Windows 11 Home software preload includes McAfee LiveSafe; trials for LastPass, ExpressVPN, and the Concepts sketching app; and an array of HP utilities ranging from QuickDrop for sharing files with your smartphone to the abovementioned Command Center, which includes network optimization and automatic, quiet, and high-performance power and cooling fan modes.

Testing the HP Spectre x360 16: Are Four Cores Enough? 

I used the performance mode for our benchmark tests, which compare the Spectre x360 16's performance with that of three other 16-inch content creator laptops. Two Asus models join the HP in flaunting deluxe OLED displays—the abovementioned Vivobook Pro 16X OLED and the ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED, which is similar but fancier with a physical instead of virtual (touchpad-based) dial for controlling Adobe Creative Suite apps. The more affordable Acer ConceptD 5 has a high-resolution IPS screen. That left one spot which I filled with a creative convertible: the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio, which is comparable to the Spectre but has a smaller 14.4-inch, forward-folding display.

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). 

We normally also run Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications, but while Photoshop seemed to run fine on the Spectre, the benchmark crashed. The convertible did complete PugetBench for Adobe's Premiere Pro video editor, matched against creative laptops including the MSI Creator 17 and HP ZBook Studio G8 and the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 4 lightweight mobile workstation.

The Spectre x360 16 is a peppy, responsive laptop; it easily exceeded the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate excellent productivity for everyday apps like Microsoft Office. That said, its quad-core processor is at a disadvantage in a content-creator segment filled with six- and eight-core systems. We'd think twice before choosing it for full-time work in tasks like 4K video editing or crunching mammoth datasets. 

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 GeForce RTX 3050 is several rungs below the top of Nvidia's GPU ladder, so while fine for content creation apps, the HP is more suited to casual games than the latest AAA adventures or fast-twitch shoot-'em-ups. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears 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 (candelas per square meter).

The Spectre shone here, combining solid battery life with superb onscreen color fidelity. It fell a little short of the 400 nits of brightness that we like to see in a high-end laptop, but its OLED panel's color and contrast more than made up for that.

Not Grabbing the Brass Ring, But Worth Grabbing 

The HP Spectre x360 16 is one of the most stylish entries in the increasingly crowded field of not-quite-workstation laptops for creative pros and digital dabblers. (We're wrapping up this review and haven't even mentioned the Apple MacBook Pro 16 and Dell XPS 15 yet.)

(Photo: Molly Flores)

It has one notable drawback (a merely adequate quad-core CPU, versus some competitors' blazing eight-core chips), but one notable advantage: the 2-in-1 ability to switch from laptop to tablet mode. Its glorious screen pushes it very close to Editors' Choice award territory, but even as a near miss, it's worth a long look if you're partial to big convertibles.