HP Envy x360 14 2-in-1 laptop review: A great all-round Windows convertible

The HP Envy x360 14 is a Windows laptop with a 360-degree hinge that allows you to use it as a tablet. Given that Windows 11 doesn’t have a touchscreen interface to match iOS or Android, you could be forgiven for asking why you’d buy it over a standard laptop with a touch-enabled screen.

In functional terms, the answer to this question comes down to whether you need to write or draw on the display and if you plan on using it for watching a lot of multimedia content. Writing and drawing is much easier when you don’t have to stretch over a keyboard, and folding the HP Envy x360 14 over on itself is very handy if you require a media player in confined spaces.

HP Envy x360 14 laptop review: What you need to know

Long a stalwart of the 2-in-1 ultra-compact market, the HP Envy x360 has now been brought up to date with a 14in, 16:10 display and the latest Intel Core Ultra silicon complete with enhanced AI capabilities.

Add to that mix an impressive OLED panel, HP’s high levels of design and build quality – plus a handy pen – and you have a versatile and capable machine for general computing duties and light to medium-intensity creative tasks.

If you doubt the very concept of the Windows 2-in-1, the new HP Envy x360 14 is the machine most likely to lead you to a Damascene conversion.

HP Envy x360 14 laptop review: Price and competition

Configuration tested: Intel Core Ultra 7 155U CPU, Intel Iris Xe iGPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 14in, 120Hz, 2,880 x 1,800 OLED display. Price when reviewed: £1,149 inc VAT

The Envy x360 14 is available with a choice of Intel’s Core Ultra 5 and 7 processors in low-power U iterations and AMD Ryzen 5 and 7 chips. You can also choose between a 120Hz, 2,880 x 1,800 OLED touchscreen or a 60Hz, 1,920 x 1,200 IPS panel, again with touch capabilities, but you can’t have an AMD chip and an OLED screen. All models come with a free HP USB-C rechargeable MPP2.0 pen.

Looking at just the 2.8K OLED models, the entry-level Core Ultra 5 125U model will set you back £999, while the Ultra 7 155U model was available for £1,149 at the time of writing.

If money is no object, Samsung’s Galaxy Book4 Pro is one of the best Windows 2-in-1s on the market. The 16in, 2.8K OLED screen is absolutely gorgeous, the keyboard is good quality, the touchpad is massive, performance is strong and battery life is impressive, too. At £1,799, it’s expensive but highly desirable.

Acer’s Meteor Lake Swift Go 14 has a few rough edges and no touchscreen but is solid value at £1,399 for the 32GB/2TB model. The 90Hz, 2.8K OLED screen is sumptuous if not overly accurate, and battery life is reasonable at just under 9hrs 30mins in our tests.

A masterclass in how to build a small, light and gorgeous laptop, the Asus Zenbook 14 has a lovely 14in, 2.8K OLED touchscreen and weighs just 1.2kg. In our opinion it’s one of the prettiest compact laptops on the market. Battery life is good at just under 11 hours, and the laptop is temptingly priced at £1,100.

No roundup for small, desirable laptops would be complete without the 13.6in Apple MacBook Air. The epic battery life and super-slim profile make up for the absence of a touchscreen and the fact you have to make do with just two Thunderbolt 4 ports. Starting at £1,099, it’s good value and deservedly popular.

READ NEXT: Best monitors for home offices

HP Envy x360 14 laptop review: Design and build quality

• Light and compact yet solid
• Good selection of I/O ports
• Very limited upgrade options

HP has certainly got the portability box ticked with the Envy x360 14; it’s impressively compact for a 2-in-1, measuring 313.3 x 218.9 x 16.9mm (WDH). That compares well with the 13.3in MacBook Air in terms of width and depth, though the HP is 5.5mm thicker.

HP quotes the Envy x360 14’s weight as 1.39kg but it tipped my scales at 1.21kg, which is very similar to the MacBook Air. That’s the equivalent of two iPad Pro 13in tablets and only just light enough for you to use it as a tablet for any length of time. When travelling, the Envy x360 14’s portability is helped by the remarkably small (125g, 95 x 50 x 20mm) 65W USB-C charger.

The Envy x360 is a solid and premium-feeling bit of kit made primarily from recycled aluminium with a sandblasted anodised finish. The Gorilla Glass-covered display makes the lid very stiff, with virtually no flex in evidence even if you try to twist it hard at the corners. The hinge is solid enough to ensure that the screen doesn’t bounce when you touch it in easel mode, and there’s no tendency for the device to slide flat in A-frame or tent mode.

Typically of Windows 2-in-1s, the Envy x360 14 lacks the physical volume or power buttons you’ll find on real tablets, so adjusting the volume means recourse to the rather fiddly touchscreen controls.

The I/O port array is good for a compact laptop, with two 10Gbits/sec USB-A ports, one 10Gbits/sec USB-C port, one Thunderbolt 4 port, an HDMI 2.1 video output and a 3.5mm audio jack. Both the USB-C ports support DP Alt Mode video output and DP charging.

All the I/O ports are positioned towards the rear of the chassis, with one USB-A on each side but both USB-Cs on the left. Even with cables in all the ports, there is still enough space on each side to use a remote mouse. The wireless card is Intel’s ever-reliable AX211, which supports 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.

The base of the Envy x360 is easy to remove, but the RAM is soldered in place and there’s only one SSD bay, so you can only upgrade the SSD or LAN module and swap the battery. There’s a handy HP video outlining all the various maintenance steps the home user can undertake on the Envy x360 14.

READ NEXT: Best laptop for students

HP Envy x360 14 laptop review: Keyboard, touchpad and webcam

• Good keyboard with clear graphics
• Spacious touchpad
• High-quality 1440p webcam

There’s a lot to like about the Envy x360’s keyboard. The bold keycap graphics are an object lesson in clarity with or without the three-stage white backlight switched on. The layout is hard to fault — you even get two full-sized cursor keys — while the typing action is crisp, positive and quiet. There’s a small amount of deck flex in the middle but no more than I would expect on any ultra-compact laptop, and definitely not enough to knock the shine off the typing experience.

At 125 x 80mm, the plastic touchpad is about as big as it could be given the size of the surrounding deck and is almost impossible to find fault with. The click-action is very positive and again, quieter than most.

The 1440p webcam is a fine performer with good levels of detail and colour and little visual noise in low-light environments. It also supports Windows Hello IR facial recognition and has a physical privacy shutter.

As well as the usual Windows Studio Effect tools, HP bundles two rather useful camera apps. Enhanced Lighting lets you use a part of the screen as a webcam light in really dark environments, while Presence Sensing turns off the display if you move out of the camera’s field of vision or a nosey parker looks over your shoulder. As OEM apps go, both are genuinely useful.

The bundled MPP2.0 pen is a handy little gadget that would set you back £70 if purchased separately. It supports 4,096 levels of pressure, comes with two additional tips, can be recharged with any USB-C charger and has a magnetic barrel so you can stick it to the empty space in front of the audio jack on the right side of the chassis when not in use.

HP Envy x360 14 laptop review: Display and audio

• Colourful 120Hz OLED touchscreen
• No colour profile options
• Tuneful but quiet speakers

The Envy x360’s 14in, 16:10 touchscreen is a Samsung-made, 2,880 x 1,800 OLED affair with a 120Hz maximum refresh rate. These Samsung 14in OLED laptop panels are becoming very common and deservedly so, as their quality is excellent.

With ample brightness levels of 374cd/m² in SDR mode and 591cd/m² in HDR, plus wide colour gamut volumes of 164% sRGB, 113% Adobe RGB and 116% DCI-P3, the panel is a visual feast. With a pixel density of 185ppi, it’s as sharp as a tack, too.

It’s a bit of a shame that HP doesn’t fit any sort of colour management software. Measuring the Delta E variance against the gamut volume closest to 100% (Adobe RGB) gave a result of 2.9, which is more than good enough for the average user if not for a creative professional, who will be looking for a reading closer to 1.

The Envy lacks a VESA DisplayHDR certificate, but HDR performance was still impressive thanks to those bold colours and an infinite contrast ratio. The display’s refresh rate can be set to 48Hz, 60Hz or 120Hz or to swap dynamically between 60Hz and 120Hz.

The DTS:X stereo speakers may lack volume, only managing to hit 72dBA when measured against a pink noise source at a 1m distance, but the sound they produce is warm, full and detailed. As I write this I’m listening to London Grammar’s Glastonbury set and the sound is resting very easily on the ear; I just wish there was more of it.

READ NEXT: Best PC speakers

HP Envy x360 14 laptop review: Performance and battery life

• 155U lacks the performance of 155H CPU
• Iris Xe rather than Arc iGPU
• Battery lasts for 9hrs 40mins

Outright performance is not the Envy x360’s strong suit because, although the processor is a Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 model, it’s the low-powered U version with a maximum TDP of 28W and 12 cores, of which only two are performance cores. For comparison, the 155H in the Acer Swift Go and Samsung Galaxy Book4 360 has a maximum TDP of 65W and 16 cores, six of which are dedicated to performance.

The Ultra 7 155U comes with Intel’s Iris Xe iGPU rather than the newer and far more powerful Arc iGPU that comes with the Ultra 155H. With half the number of X²-cores — 4 vs 8 — and a lower clock speed, the difference in performance between the two iGPUs, as with the CPUs, is marked.

In our 4K multimedia test, the Envy x360 scored 220 to the Swift Go’s 356. Any score of 200 or more means the system has ample performance to run the vast majority of day-to-day PC tasks easily. However, the strain will begin to show — and performance slow — when running 3D games or demanding programmes such as Affinity Photo 2 and CAD modelling software.

The gap between the 155U and 155H is more clearly seen in the Cinebench R23 multicore test, where the Envy x360 scored 8,338 to the Swift Go 14’s 11,627.

Before you decide that the new Envy is not for you because it can’t pull the skin off a rice pudding, remember that its 220 score in the 4K test is close to that of the 2024 MacBook M3, which scored 231. And it managed to run Serious Sam 4 at a stable 40fs at 1,920 x 1,200. For an ultra-compact, the Envy x360 14 performs well enough.

Like their more powerful H-series brethren, the Core 5 and 7 U chips have neural processors that can run AI tasks locally without hindering the CPU or GPU. This is slowly becoming a more useful feature, with Intel recently announcing over 500 OpenVINO AI models optimised for Core Ultra processors, including generative fill for everyone’s favourite open-source image editor, GIMP.

One upside of the low-power CPU is that the Envy x360 14 never gets more than slightly warm to the touch even after prolonged stress testing, and the single cooling fan seldom fires up. When it does, it’s very quiet.

Another upside is battery life. I wasn’t expecting great things from the 59Wh battery but was pleasantly impressed by the 9hrs 40mins it lasted in our standard video rundown test. Granted, the new generation of Snapdragon CoPilpot+ Windows 11 laptops such as the Microsoft Surface 7 has redefined our terms of reference here, but close to 10 hours is still a solid showing.

The Kioxia 512GB SSD proved to be a rather poor performer, recording sequential read and write speeds of 2,856MB/s and 1,582MB/s respectively. Those are the lowest scores in our comparator group, and I expected better.

HP Envy x360 14 review: Verdict

If you want a light and compact laptop that’s versatile, the Envy x360 14 ticks all the boxes. It’s light, solid, flexible enough to impress an origami master, has a superb OLED touchscreen and comes with a good pen.

The speakers are mellifluous if a bit quiet, there’s a decent selection of I/O ports and the battery life is good by x86 if not ARM standards. Performance could be stronger, but it’s unfair to judge the x360 too harshly on that front when it isn’t far off the highly regarded M3 MacBook Air.