 When I first heard HP was making a laptop wrapped in leather, I knew we had to get one, if for no reason other than to poke fun of people with more money than brains. But once I found out about its heaps of battery life, gigabit LTE connectivity, and super interesting hinge design, I started to come around to the notion that the Specter Folio might be more than just a pretty face. We could be looking at right now a serious contender against the MacBook Air and the Surface laptop. Honey is a free web browser extension that will find you the best promo codes on shopping websites like Amazon, eBay, and more. Get it today at joinhoney.com forward slash LTT. Let's see. There are two things you're going to- After you figure out the stupid pen thing. There are two things you're going to immediately notice about the Specter Folio. First, that it's covered in leather, and second, that leather smells really good. It's actually kind of amazing how much a scent can change our perceptions. Like pulling this machine out of your bag, there's like this this feeling of, for me anyway, of like readiness. Like the the closest analogs that I have are pulling on my riding gloves and stretching them out a little bit or cinching up a horse saddle ready to mount. Like it's just, it's kind of crazy, and it also feels great to hold with its nicely rounded spine. It just feels professional, but once opened up, my feelings about the Specter Folio do get a touch more complicated. So the way that the leather wraps around the screen creates this kind of weird-looking double bezel. I really wish they could have had the leather end right at the edge of the display, and overall, I think given another generation, they can probably improve the way that the metal components transition to the leather ones. And then there's this pen holder. Frankly speaking, it's stupid. Like could they not figure out any better way to secure this to the side of the display? Honestly, I would rather they had just done nothing. I'd rather they say, wear a shirt with a pocket in the front and put it there. Because other than that, the overall feel of the machine is very solid. There's virtually no flex to this thing, and I trust HP when they say that the leather is not gonna wear quickly. Like this is really nice. It's the same kind of stuff you might find in, say, a Mercedes. Now, I.O. is pretty bare-bones-ish, but overall, the three USB-C ports, two of which are Thunderbolt 3, all of which can be used for charging, give you a lot of flexibility to connect other devices to the folio, provided you're willing to carry a dongle or two, and a headphone jack is, thankfully, present. Now the display comes in both 1080p and 4k varieties. Ours rocks the 1080p one, and given the screen size, I really don't see any need to go higher than that, and thankfully, HP has provided the option to have touchscreen on either resolution. Good work, you guys. A problem with the display, though, is that it feels like there is a lot of wasted vertical real estate here. Like going from a Surface laptop or a 2018 MacBook Air to the folio is gonna be jarring, and it's made that much worse by this massive chin bar hanging out here that would, in a perfect world, just be more display for a 16 by 10 aspect ratio. It is nice to see a fairly good webcam implementation, though, and the inclusion of Windows Hello facial recognition is a huge plus. Overall, the display still gets an A for its excellent brightness, colors, and touch support, which goes well, of course, with the convertible nature of the Spectre folio. This is quite possibly its strongest point. Like, this is a really smart two-in-one laptop design. It's got these nice strong magnets so you can still operate it like a normal laptop, but put a little bit of pressure like this and boom. Moving from one mode to the other is very simple, and the ever-so-slight incline when it's in tablet mode allows the included pen to be used very comfortably. Again, though, I really hate the way it secures to the device, but the writing experience is solid, comparable to that of the Surface Pro, even if it doesn't quite keep up with the near instantaneous responsiveness of the iPad Pro. Now, you do carry around more bulk than the Surface Pro, but, I mean, I think that's a trade-off a lot of people would be willing to make for the ability to use the folio on their lap without it kind of falling off, and it's really nice that unlike some two-in-ones, the keyboard is not going to end up getting scratched up in tablet mode, so it just looks kind of ratty and gross after a short while. The speakers are pretty good with excellent clarity, making them great for hearing dialogue like in video calls. It's obviously very business-oriented products, but as you might expect, they do lack bass, and their grill takes up a lot of space at the top of the notebook that I just, I really wish could have been used to move up the keyboard and make space for a bigger trackpad. Look at this poor thing. Actually, we should talk about the keyboard first. Here's what I can say about that that's positive. If you finger-pack or you type pretty heavily, you might actually really like it. The travel and the tactile feedback are both solid. But for both me and Alex, and we do often disagree about these things, the stiffness of the key switches and some noticeable inconsistency in their key stabilization made it really difficult to get into a groove and maintain our top typing speeds. That's a shame. Now the experience will be better if you have smaller hands, since your palms will sit on this delightful leather palm rest instead of on the edge of the device. But when you compare it to the comfort of the Surface laptop and the MacBook Air, it just doesn't quite hold up. And then coming back to the trackpad, well, it's also kind of meh. There's slightly more force required to click it than I'd like, and this completely rules out Alex's thumb padding technique while he's typing. And its out-of-the-box acceleration curve is weird at best. It kind of seems like they're compensating for something. You know what I'm talking about? No, like literally. It seems like they're compensating for the small size of the touchpad to make sure you can actually get all the way across the screen. Overall, it gets, I don't know, C+. So that was the pretty bad stuff. But there are more good things. LTE support means that you can be productive from basically anywhere. Like it baffles me that features that we take for granted on couple hundred dollar smartphones like SIM slots and decent cameras have taken so long to take off in ultrabooks. Maybe this is changing though. So a device like this, along with cheaper data, will make it so that you don't have to worry about things like airport, hotel, or coffee shop Wi-Fi and all the security concerns that go along with them. And this feature is perfectly complemented by the Spectre Folio's incredible battery life. The shocking 54.3 watt-hour battery in this thing, complemented by a low-power processor and 1 watt display, means that you can expect LG grand levels of freedom with the Folio, even if it is a touch heavier. And the low-power processor brings other benefits. The Spectre Folio is completely passively cooled and comes with a built-in coffee break feature. That is to say that in short tasks, the dual core Core i7 is pretty snappy. But if you ask this thing to do anything even remotely resembling heavy lifting, like even just installing a program, you might find that you've got a minute to run over to the break room and see if anyone brought in snacks today. Okay, yeah, I was being facetious there. That's not really a feature. And honestly, this was kind of a confusing thing about this device to me because on HP's reviewer's guide, the number one pain point that HP identified for millennials was performance. But then that's where they ended up making the Spectre Folio's biggest sacrifice. Well, I mean, other than the cow that they slaughtered in order to manufacture it. The dual core processor makes it noticeably slower while performing tasks like basic video editing, working on small CAD files, and doing more serious photo work. And this wouldn't be a problem, except that basically every other ultrabook on the market, with the notable exception of the MacBook Air, has twice the core count, at least as an available option. And with the Spectre Folio coming in at about the same price as the Surface laptop, that makes it tough to recommend. It gets some things really right, like the hinge design, the battery life, and mobile internet, and it really does feel good. But it gets enough things wrong that I find myself intrigued to see where they'll go with the next one, rather than ready to pull the trigger today. It does feel good though. Speaking feels good, if you're a small business owner, it does not feel good to go home at the end of the day and be fighting with your accounting software, rather than spending time doing what you love, or with your family, or whatever the case may be. And FreshBooks is all about taking that accounting work that you might end up having to do at the end of the day when you just want to relax, and making it simple. With FreshBooks, you can create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds. You can set up online payments with just a couple of clicks and get paid up to four days faster. 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I do love this shirt.