HP announces 15-inch Spectre XT TouchSmart Ultrabook, Envy 4 Ultrabook with touch

If you thought laptop / tablet mashups were trendy, we can think of at least one other theme you’re going to see repeated ad nauseam over the coming months: PC makers putting touchscreens on things that didn’t used to have them. That’s right, in addition to all those funky-looking hybrids, you’re going to see lots of familiar-looking laptops get upgraded with touch in time for the Windows 8 launch. Exhibit A: HP, which just announced two conventional notebooks with touch. This includes a finger-friendly version of the 14-inch Envy 4 Ultrabook, as well as the Spectre XT TouchSmart Ultrabook, a 15-inch version of the Spectre XT announced earlier this year. Both will be available during the holiday season. That’s the short version, but if you follow past the break, we’ve got a lot to talk about in the way of specs. Join us, will you?

Starting with that Spectre XT, this is the same aluminum-and-magnesium design introduced on the 13-inch XT, right down to that soft-touch bottom. Aside from being bigger, though, it also steps up to a 1080p IPS touchscreen, making this the first time HP’s used a 1,920 x 1,080 display on one of its Ultrabooks. It’s also relatively thin, at 17.9mm and 4.77 pounds — an impressive feat given that Intel requires Ultrabooks this size to be no thicker than 22mm (and that’s without factoring in touch-enabled machines, which are allowed to be a bit thicker). On the inside, it runs Ivy Bridge processors and can be configured with either solid-starage or a hybrid hard drive paired with a 32GB SSD.

 

HP Spectre XT TouchSmart Ultrabook

HP Spectre XT TouchSmart Ultrabook hands-on

As you can imagine, that larger footprint means the Spectre XT TouchSmart has room for more ports than its little brother: take a tour around the device you’ll find an Ethernet jack, two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 socket, a memory card reader, a 3.5mm headphone port and a Kensington lock slot. Incidentally, too, it’s the first HP system to have a Thunderbolt port. Software-wise, it comes with a two-year subscription to Norton antivirus software as well as full copies of Adobe Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. It comes with a generous two-year warranty, too, but only if you buy it through HP Direct.

HP ENVY TouchSmart Ultrabook 4

Moving on to the Envy TouchSmart Ultrabook 4 (how’s that for a mouthful?) this has the same exact industrial design as the current Envy Ultrabooks and Sleekbooks, except the touchscreen adds a little heft (it weighs 4.77 pounds and measures 23mm thick). For the unfamiliar, though, this has a similar interior to the Spectre XT TouchSmart, but the chassis has some plastic bits, and the screen resolution is a mediocre 1,366 x 768. That makes sense, given that this is supposed to be more of a mid-range machine, but it’s worth noting you can configure this with higher-end specs like a 2GB AMD GPU (sorry, we don’t know the exact card yet). Either way, the system comes standard with Beats Audio and a subwoofer, so we expect the sound quality should be decent for a mid-tier system.

The 15-inch Spectre XT TouchSmart will be available sometime in December starting at $1,400. We’ve got fewer details on the touch-enabled Envy 4, however: all we know is that it will arrive in time for the holidays, with the price to be announced at a later date. Until then, though, we went to town taking hands-on photos so hopefully those will sate your appetite in the meantime.

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