Best devices for Work: Tech Awards 2020 Editor's Choice Results (Part 3)

Best Ultraportable Notebook

Note: This article was first published on 24 Feb 2020.

The very best devices for work (Tech Awards 2020)

For better or worse, we spend a lot of our lives at work. Work is a big part of many people’s lives and so it is imperative that we have the best tools for the job. Nobody wants to lug around a behemoth of a notebook just so that you can check your spreadsheets, and certainly, no one wants to find themselves stuck with a printer that takes ages to scan a document. Fortunately, for Tech Awards 2020, we have gathered and tested all the major devices that you need to help you do your best work. These are the award categories that the editors have assessed for this segment:-

• Best Ultraportable Notebook
• Best Workgroup Office Printer
• Best  SOHO Printer
• Best Smartphone
• Innovation Awards

Other segments include the Best devices for Home, Mobility devices, Work (this article) and Gaming. Not to forget, our Readers' Choice results for the Best Tech Brands.

Read on and find out who the winners are in each category! For this segment, we begin with the most indispensable tool in every mobile worker’s arsenal – the ultraportable notebook.

Best Ultraportable Notebook

Ultraportable notebooks are one of the most exciting categories in computing today. Thanks to advances in processor technology and materials, they have never been more compact, more portable, and more suited to life on the road. Today's thin and light notebooks are just over a kilogram heavy and can easily run for hours. Support for new technologies like Thunderbolt 3 also means they can be docked when users get home, which improves performance and functionality. These attributes make ultraportable notebooks the weapon of choice for many users today.

To make the cut for this year’s awards, the notebook must be among the slimmest and lightest in the brand's lineup, and it must have been announced last year. It can be a traditional notebook or a convertible or detachable. Finally, it must be powered by a full Intel Core processor (no ultra-low-voltage variants).

Nominees:

• Acer Swift 5
• ASUS ZenBook 14 UX434
• Dell XPS 13 2-in-1
• HP Spectre X360 13
• Lenovo Yoga S940
• LG gram 14
• Microsoft Surface Pro 7
• Razer Blade Stealth (Late 2019)

And the winner is...

This year saw the release of many seriously competent notebooks. Many were thoughtful, some offered good value of money, a couple were downright beautiful, but there could only be one winner and it is the HP Spectre x360 13.

The Spectre x360 13 won because it does a lot of things right. To begin, the design is fantastic. And because it is a convertible, it's versatile too. It has an edgy, angular look that has become a signature of the brand and it is really compact. The display is brilliant and has really small bezels. Usually, a compact design means trading off some ports, but the Spectre has just about all the ports you could want from an ultraportable notebook – two USB-C Thunderbolt 3 ports and even a full-size USB-A port. Finally, another thing that it does really well is its battery life. In our tests, we found that it lasts considerably longer than its rivals. Really, its only glaring faults were its below-average graphics performance and its tiny trackpad. Overall, the Spectre x360 13 is the best ultraportable notebook at the point of publishing this article.

For more details on how we selected our winners, check out the full reviews and articles listed in the References section below.

References

• Acer Swift 5 review coming soon
• ASUS ZenBook 14 UX434 review
• Dell XPS 13 2-in-1
• HP Spectre x360 13 review
• Lenovo Yoga S940 review coming soon
• LG gram 14 (2019)  review coming soon
• Microsoft Surface Pro 7 review
• Razer Blade Stealth 13 review