HP's sub-par Spectre One 23 all-in-one desktop Video

HP's sub-par Spectre One 23 all-in-one desktop Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Rich Brown, senior editor for CNET. Today, we're gonna take a look at the HP Spectre One 23. This is the HP's new high-end Windows 8 all-in-one. There's a few interesting features, but overall it's kind of a buzz actually. It's little disappointing. As you could see, it's got a nice glass design appear its edge to edge of course. Also, there's input devices here. There's a keyboard, a mouse, and a touch pad, all are included with the system. What does not have is a touchscreen. That's a system apart from pretty much every other high-end Windows 8 all-in-one. The combination of the mouse and touch pad are designed to offset the absent touchscreen, but it really doesn't work as well as you want it too. The probably best is just going with the mouse and keyboard entirely and getting rid of the touch pad, but even that you're feeling a limited Windows 8 experience. Now, the core of this PC is fairly decent. This is the step-up model cost about 1600 bucks. So, actually it's a pretty expensive, but it does come with the core i7 CPU, 10 gigs of RAM and a 1 terabyte hard drive. This also comes with an entry level on video GeForce GT 610 Graphics chip, but it's really not enough to make this accompanied game in PC and even newer titles on lower ends won't play very well. So one sort of unique feature of this is it has a near-field communication receiver, a.k.a. NFC. Now, NFC is kind of an early technology and it doesn't really work as well as we'd like too. The idea is that you're supposed to be on a transferred data between say a Smartphone and the system just by tapping it on the spy. You may have seen that in the Samsung Galaxy S3 commercial, but the problem with their system is that it doesn't recognize input from those other devices, so we swiped to Samsung Galaxy, we've swiped to Nokia Lumia 920 and neither devices recognized by the system. Also, the HP is not on a very good job of sort of introducing you to the NFC tag experience. There's no documentation or anything really apparent about what those tags are included with the system and you have to download 2 apps from HP in order to make them work. Why they're not included on the system out of the box is sort of a mystery. And you can see the HP has made some effort to make that the design of the systems stand out a little bit. There's a nice sort of curving back support here on the monitor and inside of that you actually find the motherboard. You can take the whole back panel off and get to the memory, the hard drive. If you're an enterprising enthusiast, you can may be even dig a little deeper, but for most people they'll appreciate the fact that you can easily swap up memory and hard drive so that's cool. On the side in the rear of the base unit, you also find the ports for this PC. There's a couple of USB 3 ports, HDMI input as well as some audio ports, but there's no optical driver. It's not common among high-end PC these days actually and, of course, you can always add one. Now, the core i7 chip gives the systems some nice performance, but the lack of a touchscreen and the fact that its monitor is small for its price kind of hurt the system from the value standpoint. HP also includes some features that we're not entirely sure we want like the NFC receiver as well as the touch pad. So, if you're in the market for a higher end Windows 8 all-in-one, I would probably skip this system. So, I'm Rich Brown, this is the HP Spectre One 23.