HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 review: A lovely 2-in-1 with a handful of flaws

The laptop landscape is an interesting one right now: filled with premium models of different designs, from standard clamshells with incredible battery life to dual-screen productivity monsters you can slide into a bag. The HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 is up there with the nicest I’ve come across in recent times: a 2-in-1 convertible laptop that’s built like a Rolls Royce and that can serve a variety of roles.

It isn’t, as we’ll see, particularly great value, but rarely does desirability come cheap – and that is what this laptop delivers in spades.

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HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 review: What you need to know

Extract this laptop from the box and you know it’s going to be expensive. The hinge feels exquisitely engineered, with a smooth, well-damped action that wouldn’t be out of place on a boutique audiophile item. It feels heavy and well-made, with close tolerances all round and a shape that, within the restrictions of keeping a laptop usable, is unusually interesting and pleasing to the eye.

The flip side (if you’ll excuse the obvious pun) is that, under the hood, it’s a standard 2-in-1 convertible, like so many before it. The hinge allows you to use it like a regular clamshell laptop and you can fold it around and use the keyboard face down as a stand, prop it up like a tent, or push it all the way around and use it as a giant tablet or digital art board.

To that end, it also comes with an active stylus with pressure and tilt sensitivity, and a 14in OLED, 2.8K touchscreen. Inside, is one of Intel’s latest Core Ultra (Series 2) chips and a selection of suitably modern components.

HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 review: Price and competition

Configuration tested: Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, 32GB RAM, 2TB SSD, 14in 2,880 x 1,800 120Hz OLED touchscreen with active stylus. Price when reviewed: £1,899 inc VAT

Prices start, unsurprisingly, quite high. The “basic” Core Ultra 5 235V model has 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD and will set you back £1,700. The Core Ultra 7 258V laptop, meanwhile, comes with 16GB and a 1TB SSD or 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD. Weirdly, prices for this model start at £1,699, a pound cheaper than the Core Ultra 5 model, while the top-end model costs £1,899.

The list of direct competitors in the premium 2-in-1 space is quite short, but you still have options:

• The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 is the obvious alternative. It’s just as lovely as the HP OmniBook Flip 14, has similar features and is priced similarly, too. The top-end Core Ultra 7 model only comes with a 1TB SSD, though

• The Microsoft Surface Pro 11 is a detachable, rather than a convertible 2-in-1 but, in our opinion, it’s the best around right now. Prices start at £1,349, but if you want one with an OLED display and equivalent RAM and storage to the OmniBook you’ll be paying a similar amount of money

• An off-the-wall alternative is the Asus ZenBook Pro Duo. It’s a lot chunkier and heavier than the HP but comes with two 14in OLED screens, and starts at £1,599 for the 2024 model. It comes equipped with the older Meteor Lake Core Ultra, so battery life isn’t as good but it’s a faster performer

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HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 review: Design

The HP is a beautifully made thing. Give the lid and base a twist and there’s barely a creak and not much flex, either. The screen is topped with Gorilla Glass 5, which should minimise scuffs and scratches. It looks the business, all clad in dark blue matte finish paint. I particularly like the rear corners, which have been chopped off, each neatly hosting a single USB-C port.

The one in the left corner is a 10Gbits/sec USB 3.2 Gen 2 port, the one in the right corner is a Thunderbolt 4 port capable of delivering speeds up to 40Gbits/sec. You only get one more port, though – another Thunderbolt 4 connector situated on the right edge, just above where the bundled stylus snaps magnetically home.

The OmniBook Ultra Flip isn’t the lightest thing in the world at 1.34kg or the thinnest, but the payback is that it’s a relatively easy laptop to maintain and get inside. Remove a mere four Torx screws on the underside, pry off the base and the innards are revealed in double quick time.

You can’t upgrade much aside from the SSD – the RAM is integrated into the CPU package and the Intel BE210 Wi-Fi 7 module is soldered in place – but at least the battery is easily accessible and you can get at the fans for cleaning, too.

HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 review: Keyboard, touchpad and webcam

Just like the OmniBook’s chassis, the keyboard and touchpad are first-class. There’s plenty of travel to each key, a good firm dig of feedback, no bounce and the layout is largely sensible. As has become the norm, though, the up and down cursor keys are half-height, which I could do without.

I’m also not fond of HP’s decision to put the power button and fingerprint reader in the top right corner of the keyboard. This would be fine on a regular clamshell laptop but on a convertible that’s designed to be used, at least for part of its life, with the keyboard tucked away and difficult to get at, you need the volume and power controls to be situated on the edge of the chassis somewhere. Likewise, while the white, two-stage backlight is effective, it feels a little stingy given the cost of the laptop.

The touchpad is more impressive. It’s nice and large, measuring 138 x 86mm, and responsive to gestures and taps, while clicks are captured via a haptic feedback mechanism much like Apple’s Force Touch system. This means you can click or double-click across the whole surface of the trackpad and it works rather well. You can even turn off the haptics and just tap to click if you want.

The 1,440p webcam is another surprising disappointment, delivering grainy, soft, noisy images, even in moderately good light. On the plus side, it has an integrated, physical privacy shutter you can slide across neatly when you want to shut off visuals, and there’s Windows Hello face login support. In this day and age, however, and in a laptop this pricey, image quality really should be better.

HP tries to make up for that with some handy bonus features, courtesy of the preinstalled myHP software. My favourite is the setting that monitors the distance you’re sitting from the display and warns you when you get too close; however, the gesture control system, which is supposed to allow you to play/pause and scroll using hand gestures, didn’t work very well.

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HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 review: Display and audio

OLED displays are getting more and more common on premium laptops and the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 is equipped with a good one. Resolution is a sharp 2,880 x 1,800, it refreshes at 120Hz and colour reproduction runs to 100% of the DCI-P3 gamut. In fact, you can choose from three pre-calibrated profiles in the OmniBook’s display settings: sRGB, DCI-P3 and AdobeRGB, the latter being a rarity at any price.

In testing, I measured peak brightness at 382cd/m² in general use and 612cd/m² during HDR playback, which is plenty bright enough. The contrast ratio is perfect, as you’d expect, the screen is capable of reproducing a huge 117.1% of the DCI-P3 colour space and I found colour accuracy to be very good, too. I measured an average Delta E of 1.14 in the DCI-P3 profile (lower is better), 0.89 with the sRGB profile selected and 1.19 for AdobeRGB. All those results indicate this is a screen that’s up to colour-critical work.

I was less enamoured with the stereo speaker system. It sounded a little thin and metallic and although it goes plenty loud – I measured around 80dBA from a metre away recording a pink noise source – there is a touch of distortion at maximum volume.

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HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 review: Performance and battery life

We’ve only looked at a small handful of laptops with the Intel Core Ultra (Series 2) chips inside, but they’re all fairly similar when it comes to performance levels in the benchmarks. That is to say, they’re a little slower than the previous generation Meteor Lake for CPU and GPU performance but vastly superior when it comes to battery life.

The HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 on test has an eight-core Intel Core Ultra 7 258V at the helm (backed by 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD), and reflects a similar pattern of performance. It fell behind its Core Ultra (Series 2) rivals a touch in our in-house 4K media benchmarks, but there was little to no difference across the Geekbench 6 CPU and GPU tests.

Under stress, the OmniBook performed nicely. At 100% CPU and GPU utilisation, in Best performance mode, the fans were never overly noisy and, after an early spike, CPU temperatures settled at a maximum of 80°C. I’m not too happy with the amount of RAM Microsoft’s Copilot features like to hold onto, but terminate those processes and you’ve got yourself a nippy, responsive machine.

And as for battery life, that’s where the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 shines. In our video playback test, it lasted an impressive 17hrs 20mins, which is far better than the previous generation of Intel Ultrabooks were able to manage, and more than a match for Apple’s M3 generation of MacBook Air machines. It can’t quite match the very best of the Snapdragon laptops we’ve reviewed over the past few months, but does hold the advantage of greater Windows ecosystem compatibility, which is useful if you need to run obscure legacy x86 applications.

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HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 review: Verdict

All in all, the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 is a fine 2-in-1 laptop. It’s the best for battery life that we’ve seen from that particular genre of machine, and it performs adequately as well. HP combines that with fantastic build quality, decent accessibility, a generous specification for the money, decent levels of repairability and upgradeability, plus a great display.

For all this laptop’s strengths, however, there’s also a selection of weaknesses undermining its overall appeal. The lack of a power button or volume buttons on the edge is annoying, the speakers are loud but harsh and the webcam is, frankly, terrible.

In a cheaper laptop, those niggles wouldn’t bother me so much, but the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 is a premium laptop with great potential, and it deserves much better.