Following up on a mysterious teaser posted last week, HP has officially unveiled the Envy 14 Spectre at the Consumer Electronics Show in Last Vegas. Pitched as a "premium ultrabook", the 0.78 inches thick laptop features a stylish midnight black glass design on the outer side and silver glass palm rest on the inside, which HP claims makes the laptop more durable while keeping the weight down.
As the name suggests, the Spectre features a 14-inch (1600 x 900) Radiance display but HP was able to squeeze all of the machines componentes into a typical 13.3-laptop frame. Starting at $1,399, the base model includes a Core i5-2467M processor, 4GB of RAM, a 128GB mSATA SSD, backlit keyboard and a nine-hour battery. As you'd expect, there will be Core i7 and other configuration options as well.
HP didn't skimp on ports and connectivity --- the Envy 14 Spectre has an SD card reader, two USB ports as well as HDMI, MiniDisplay, and Ethernet ports. There's also support for Intel's Wireless Display, HP's CoolSense technology, and a built-in Wireless Audio feature that allows users to stream uncompressed audio to up to four external devices or directly to any KleerNet-compatible device.
Last but not least, HP included a touch-to-share implementation of NFC in the laptop. Although the company says it's just an "experimental feature" at the moment, it will be releasing an Android app for NFC-equipped phones that will let you transfer URLs from your handset's browser by tapping it to the laptop's palm rest. HP hopes to extend the functionality down the road as people begin to experiment with NFC a bit more.
The Spectre will go on sale in the U.S. on February 8, with wider availability expected in March.