Living with the HP Spectre Foldable PC

pcmag.com:

I've been very intrigued by the concept of a foldable PC, so when I got the chance to use HP's version for the past couple of weeks, I jumped at the opportunity. The HP Spectre Foldable PC has a 17-inch foldable OLED panel, and it offers the ability to use it in a variety of ways, with the included Bluetooth keyboard. You can have the whole panel folded out, flip down a kickstand, and use it as a desktop. You can lay it flat and use it as a tablet, with an included pen. Or you can fold it in half, put the keyboard on the bottom, and use it like a 12.3-inch laptop. Alternatively, you could just put the keyboard on the lower half of the folded area, and get a larger 14-inch laptop, albeit one in which the lower part of the display is flat while the top part is vertical.

It's very flexible, and that really stood out. At last week's Gartner Symposium, I used it as a 12.3-inch laptop to take notes in a lot of the sessions. The keyboard is pretty flat, and not the best I've used, but it was more than adequate—certainly better than an onscreen keyboard would have been. I'm happy it includes indicator lights showing when the speakers and microphone are muted, but would have preferred it if the keyboard was backlit, which can be helpful in dark rooms.

At night, or when I had downtime in the press room, I opened it up to a desktop and had a much larger screen to use for writing or for reviewing and editing my photos. That was a very nice change from what I'm used to.

This is a different experience than I've had with other notebooks. I've used 16 or 17-inch notebooks, and while they certainly have their place, they are too big to use in your lap for taking notes. I use a lot of 14-inch notebooks—today's enterprise standard—and they