HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 review: Hybrid with long battery life
HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 at a glance
For:
- Long battery life
- solid build quality
- practical 2-in-1 design.
Against:
- Expensive by consumer laptop standards.
- You can buy more powerful hardware for the same money.
- Microsoft Copilot AI.
Maybe:
- Odd port placement.
- Intel processors can be a mixed bag.
Verdict: If you need a thin, light Windows laptop with sufficient power, long battery life and full Intel compatibility this is a good choice.
Price: List price is NZ$3700, but advertised prices range as low as NZ$3000.
From the outside, the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 looks like a business class hybrid or 2-in-1 laptop. Don’t be fooled, Omnibook is an HP consumer brand.
Despite its plastic case, the build quality is excellent. Plastic laptop cases can feel flimsy and insubstantial, this one is solid and can take the rough and tumble it will get if you carry it around for work.
Hinges can be troublesome on 2-in-1 computers. I found the hinge on the Ultra Flip coped during my month-long review period.
As a 2-in-1, it can be used as a standard laptop or folded all the way around so the computer becomes a tablet. There’s also a tent-like position, which I never used, but could be useful for presentations.
As the name suggests the display is 14 inches. It’s a 2880x1800 pixel OLED touch screen that can handle refresh rates up to 120Hz. The screen is bright enough for indoor use and works outdoors in the shade or when it is cloudy. It wasn’t readable on a sunny day.
The speakers are good enough for making Zoom calls and office work, but a touch tinny for listening to music. That’s par for the course with this style of laptop.
HP provides a full width keyboard for comfortable typing. The TrackPad works well.
Possibly the best Windows PC around right now
The HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 has an official price of NZ$3700, which is expensive for a consumer laptop.
The same money could buy a generously specified 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro with the M4 processor, 24GB or Ram and a terabyte of storage, or a 15 inch MacBook Air with all the trimmings.
Microsoft Surface devices in the same price range use the Snapdragon processor, which carries some technical baggage. Intel may have lost its must-have processor status, but you’ll encounter fewer legacy compatibility problems with the Intel-based Omnibook Ultra Flip and it comes close to achieving the battery life you get with ARM-based devices.
Other Windows-Intel laptops in the same price range include HP’s Omen Transcend 14 gaming laptop and Lenovo’s Yoga Pro gaming laptops.
Considering I recently saw the computer on sale in a retail store for a shade over NZ$3000 it may pay to shop around if you want one.
In terms of hardware, the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 has nothing to fault. It’s the best recent Windows machine I’ve seen. It comes with everything you need. There were no negative hardware surprises.
There’s enough processor power to cope with everyday tasks and it should remain capable of coping with likely workloads for years to come. If you need more computing power, you should consider buying a business class laptop.
The weakest aspect of the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 is Windows 11. While some readers will disagree, as someone who was intimate with Windows, but now spends most of their working life on a Mac, Windows 11 feels flawed.
AI is not the drawcard for this computer that HP thinks it is
Heaven knows MacOS is not perfect, but during testing I repeatedly ran into Windows bugs and crashes. In particular, the Ultra Flip 14 system would crash even while asleep and I had multiple problems with drivers that would inexplicably stop working.
Even when Windows is working, the software lets the computer down. HP makes a big deal out of the AI features of the Ultra Flip, especially its integration with Copilot. In my experience this is the least useful consumer-oriented AI product that I’ve seen. Every text-based AI task I threw at the computer was underwhelming.
HP says its own brand AI companion is still in beta. That certainly shows. But consumers who pay a hefty premium for their hardware might reasonably expect better. One promising feature promoted in the marketing was an AI ability to optimise the computer’s performance. I can’t say I saw any evidence of that working during the review period.
Verdict: HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14
Where does this leave us? HP has built a very good, if not great, laptop. If you’re committed to Windows and plan to dabble in AI, the Omnibook Ultra Flip 14 is definitely worth considering.