HP Envy Spectre XT TouchSmart pictures

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If you've seen one HP Envy laptop, you've seen them all. Last year, the company made a conscious decision to have a single, unified design across all its thin-and-light laptops, from this $1,199 Spectre XT TouchSmart all the way down to the cheapest Sleekbook. As we discovered with the original Spectre XT, that’s both a blessing and a curse: the XT TouchSmart is handsome and sleek, but fairly bland, and but some parts feel as cheap as the more inexpensive laptops in HP’s lineup.

For instance, the laptop has a brushed aluminum deck, with very little flex in the keyboard tray and a shiny beveled edge, but where that edge meets the bottom half of the laptop there’s an ugly seam. The chassis creaks occasionally when lifted, and ports on the motherboard don’t line up perfectly with their sockets. And while most of the screen is covered with glass, it’s ringed by a bezel of cheap glossy black plastic that looks out of place on a laptop in this price range. None of this should really keep you from using the machine effectively, but it doesn’t feel like a premium laptop. While not bad for a 15-incher, at 4.96 pounds and 0.87 inches thick the XT TouchSmart isn’t all that thin or light. You’ll want two hands to carry it around.

Generally, the laptop doesn’t feel quite as well put together as its predecessor, but the chassis is at least roomy enough that you won’t have to look hard to find places to plug things in. You’ll find two USB 3.0 sockets, the Thunderbolt port, an HDMI port and a spring-loaded Gigabit Ethernet jack on the left, and a USB 2.0 port, combo 3.5mm headset jack and an SD card slot on the right edge of the unit.

The Spectre XT TouchSmart’s external appearance might not be anything special, but the screen most certainly is: the 15-inch, 1080p IPS touchscreen display might be the best on a consumer-grade HP laptop yet. It’s exceptionally crisp and colorful — this Oblivion movie trailer looks positively fantastic in 1080p — and it has nice wide viewing angles too. Still, it can’t stand with the very best we’ve seen, like the Chromebook Pixel, the Zenbook Prime, and the Macbook Pro with Retina Display. For one thing, it doesn’t get nearly as bright as some of its competition: I had to set brightness to 80 percent to use the XT TouchSmart comfortably in a dark room.

The glossy glass surface is also highly reflective, which could prove annoying… though it’s a small sacrifice to make for a touchscreen this go. Touch response is butter-smooth, and the screen didn’t skip a beat or miss a gesture in days worth of use. My only complaint there is leveled at Microsoft, because it’s still difficult to precisely manipulate small items on the Windows Desktop with a 15-inch 1080p screen.

I found myself using the touchscreen here and there to quickly access settings or press buttons on websites, but it wasn’t quite as useful as on laptops with lower-resolution displays. It’s worth the tradeoff here, but I wish Microsoft would figure out a way to give us the best of both worlds.

HP’s still relying on Beats software processing to turn the output of tiny tinny speakers into something vaguely listenable, and that Beats processing is still doing a reasonably good job. The Spectre XT TouchSmart has four such speakers, and provides a good stereo effect if you’re sitting right in front of the laptop, in the sweet spot. Bass is pretty limited and highs can get shrill enough that you’ll want headphones for serious listening, but the speakers are good enough for radio tunes or the occasional movie.

For $1,199, the HP Envy Spectre XT TouchSmart comes with a fairly standard set of ultrabook specs: a dual-core 1.7GHz Core i5-3317U processor, 4GB of RAM, integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics, a 500GB hard drive, a 32GB solid state cache, and 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi for wireless connectivity. For about $150 extra, you can configure it with a 1.9GHz Core i7-3517U CPU and 8GB of memory instead, and that’s the version I tested.

With those specs, performance is just fine, about what you’d expect. With integrated graphics, you’re not going to be editing loads of video or playing many intensive games — Borderlands 2 and Just Cause 2 aren’t really playable, for example — but the Core i7 handled regular tasks with ease. Windows 8 didn’t chug or crash once during my testing, and the operating system stayed responsive throughout. The only time I noticed any slowdown whatsoever was when trying to run a pair of 1080p videos simultaneously, on top of several Windows 8 apps and a bustling web browser.

You can also expect speedy boot and wake times, even without a dedicated solid state drive inside — here, the 32GB solid state cache works admirably to shoulder the load by recognizing things you do often and and saving them on the faster drive. In my tests, the XT TouchSmart took about 13 seconds to boot, and between 1.5 and 4 seconds to wake from sleep.

HP includes a little bit of bloatware on the XT TouchSmart, but it’s not bad at all. You’ll find sMedia 360 TrueSync, HP Connected Music, and a small selection of pre-installed Windows 8 apps like eBay, iHeartRadio and Amazon Kindle, but it’s actually a pretty light load. In fact, some of the bundled software could actually be useful, like the barebones Adobe Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements for editing photos and videos. HP even includes a full two-year subscription to Norton Internet Security, rather than the annoying pop-up ridden trial that comes with many a laptop.

Battery life is where the Envy Spectre XT TouchSmart’s value falls apart. In our Verge Battery Test, where we run through a series of high-res images and websites over a wireless connection with screen brightness set to a modest 65 percent, the laptop lasted just 3 hours, 34 minutes. That’s already one of the lowest scores we’ve seen from an ultrabook — a full hour below even its shortest-lived competitors — but you haven’t heard the worst yet.

When I tried to actually use the Spectre XT TouchSmart with my typical workload of auto-refreshing browser tabs, two push email accounts, and Pandora streaming music in the background, the laptop died after just 2 hours and 18 minutes of use. There’s a word for that: atrocious. HP currently quotes a 5 hour, 15 minute battery life, but I can’t imagine a realistic computing scenario where that would be true.

On the plus side, the laptop stays cool and usually fairly quiet, even when plugged into the wall, and the soft-touch rubber coating on the base nicely insulates your legs from what heat the laptop does put out. When you stress the processor, the fan does whirr noisily, but it’s an occasional occurrence.