HP Spectre XT TouchSmart Ultrabook Review

Conclusion: The PC Compromise

My esteemed colleague Brian Klug tweeted recently that PC manufacturers can't seem to produce anything that doesn't have some horrible flaw. Everything could be perfect except for one thing that was cheaped out on, and it threatens to bring the whole thing down, and unfortunately his assertion holds water here. The Spectre XT TouchSmart has the makings of a solid ultrabook, but it's let down by miserly decisions on HP's part.

The frustrating thing is that the shortcomings could've largely been avoided. If you gut the Spectre XT TouchSmart, you have an attractive shell, a practical and inobtrusive cooling system, a solid speaker system, great clickpad, workable keyboard, and a beautiful display. From a purely physical standpoint, this notebook is aces. I'm not sure what could really be done to improve the battery life, but that's something I think I'd be willing to take on the chin if it meant everything else was stellar. I'm not a big proponent of Thunderbolt, but the inclusion is going to at least raise an eyebrow for someone.

Yet it seems like a bean counter took this beautiful shell and just fouled the whole thing up to save a couple bucks here and there. The unit we've tested is a retail configuration, but it's buried in software bloat. HP's Support Assistant seems like a good idea but the execution is a little bit lacking and worse, it's intrusive. You get a free 2-year subscription to Norton, which may or may not be your cup of tea, and I keep wishing WildTangent would just disappear. I'm not sure the bloat is responsible for the system's overall poor hardware performance, either.

Even if a clean reformat would correct the CPU performance issue, you still have to contend with the dire storage subsystem. I'm not a fan of SSD caching and at this price, the Spectre XT should be shipping with a 128GB SSD minimum, full stop. If it were easy to just pop the notebook open and upgrade these things, that would be wonderful, but it's not.

If you're attracted to the Spectre XT TouchSmart, your best bet is going to be doing a custom configuration on HP's site, but even then the upgrade prices are exorbitant. $75 to go to 8GB of DDR3 isn't too bad, but $170 for a 128GB SSD and a staggering $370 for a 256GB SSD is just offensive. I can't help but get the persistent feeling that this was a solid product systematically ruined by a bean counter. The old adage that there are no bad products, only bad prices is certainly true here, but it's compounded by a series of cuts that undermine the product itself every step of the way. Hopefully the Spectre XT TouchSmart is refreshed when Haswell arrives with a more sensible configuration.