HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 review: There’s so much to like

I really liked HP’s Spectre x360 14 2-in-1. It was incredibly well-built, drop-dead gorgeous, was built around a spectacular OLED display, and at the time, landed on our ranking of the best laptops you could buy. I was a little nervous when HP announced its rebranding, doing away with the Spectre line and introducing the OmniBook is its new brand for its entire consumer lineup.

The OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 is the Spectre’s true replacement, and when I pulled it out of the box, I was a little relieved. It’s built around Intel’s latest Lunar Lake chipset, and that needed testing, but the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 shares many of the same great characteristics as its predecessors. It’s not as long-lasting as some other Lunar Lake laptops in terms of battery life, but it’s still a great 2-in-1 option.

Specs and configuration

HP’s prices vary from sale to sale, and so you have to check regularly to see what the actual price is when you’re ready to make your purchase. The OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 is no different. The base model with a Core Ultra 5 226V chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and the standard 14-inch 2.8K OLED display has a list price $1,450 but is currently on sale for $1,100 at the time of writing. My review unit with a Core Ultra 7 258V, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD is on sale for $1,400, down from a list price of $1,750. And then the high-end configuration with a Core Ultra 9 288V and a 2TB SSD lists for $2,080 but is on sale right now at $1,730.

If you compare the list prices to a competitor like the Asus Zenbook S 14, another Lunar Lake laptop, the HP is more expensive. The Asus costs $1,399 for a Core Ultra 7 258V, 32GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a 14-inch OLED display. The equivalent HP list price would be a more expensive $1,700, but the sale price is slightly less at $1,350. And then consider the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, which is just $1,199 with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a 14.5-inch OLED display. With 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, it’s $1,313. That’s less than the HP’s sale prices.

The bottom line is that the OmniBook Ultra Flip tends to run on the more expensive side, though the sale prices make it more competitive.

Design

The Spectre x360 14 was an awesome 2-in-1. It had a gorgeous aesthetic, was solidly built, and featured some useful features like USB-C ports notch of the back corners that allowed plugging in and keep cables neatly out of the way. The OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 has a slightly less ostentatious design, but it maintains what was best about the Spectre. And it’s a strong competitor against laptops like the Zenbook S14, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, and the Yoga Slim 7i that has a larger 15.3-inch display.

To begin with, the notches are still there and remain just as functional. The build quality is incredibly solid, with no bending, flexing, or twisting in the lid, keyboard deck, or chassis. The hinge is just slightly too firm to open the lid with one hand, but that’s because it has to hold everything in place in clamshell, tent, media, and tablet modes. Simply put, the OmniBook exudes quality just like the best premium laptops.

And while the OmniBook doesn’t have the same colorful accents as the old Spectre, its all-black color way is just as attractive. The edges are more rounded, which is not only a good look but also helps the OmniBook being more comfortable to hold as a tablet. I’ve mentioned a few other very nice laptops I’ve reviewed lately, and the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 is as nicely design as any of them.

It’s also just as portable. It’s thin at 0.59 inches and light at 2.97 pounds. Its display bezels are reasonably small, especially for a 360-degree convertible 2-in-1.

Keyboard and touchpad

I’ve long been a fan of HP’s keyboards, particularly those in the Specre lineup. The keycaps are large with highly legible lettering, and there’s a ton of key spacing. The switches are light and snappy, giving a precise feel. I found the OmniBook’s keyboard to be every bit as comfortable as Apple’s Magic Keyboard, my other favorite, for long-form writing — such as this review. HP gave the function keys a gray color and it helps them stand out, but that does detract a little from the otherwise cohesive aesthetic. The power button is a light-blue color with a bright LED, and it helps identify it but, again, it kind of stands out a little too much.

Equally excellent is the large touchpad that takes up most of the available space on the palm rest. Not only is it large enough, it’s also a haptic feedback touchpad that’s responsive and supports clicking across the entire surface. It doesn’t have the same kind of Force Click functionality of Apple’s Force Touch haptic touchpad, but it’s still very good and welcome here.

The display is pen- and touch-enabled, of course, and everything works as it should. If you want a laptop that can convert to a tablet for writing and drawing on the display, then the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 is a great example of the form.

Connectivity and webcam

Connectivity is pretty light for a 14-inch laptop. There are just three USB-C ports — two of them with Thunderbolt 4, and one of them provides power. It’s nice that two are tucked away in the notches, but I would have liked to see at least on legacy port and an SD card reader. At least there’s a 3.5mm audio jack, which Dell dropped on the XPS 13. Wireless connectivity is up-to-date.

The webcam is a high-res 9MP model with an infrared camera for Windows 11 Hello facial recognition. There’s also a fingerprint reader in the power button. This is as good a time as any to mention that the OmniBook has a fast enough neural processing unit (NPU) to power Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC AI initiative. Today, it supports the enhanced Microsoft Studio Effects software, which includes AI-assisted background blur and replace, filters, and auto framing. HP’s own AI Companion software is also on its way, which will support a variety of on-device features under the rubrics Discover, Analyze, and Perform that apply AI to getting intelligence assistance using the laptop, analyzing files, and optimizing performance.

Display and audio

The OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 has one display option: a 2.8K (2880 x 1800) OLED panel running at up to 120Hz. Out of the box, it’s awesome, with OLED’s usual inky blacks and dynamic colors.

My colorimeter agreed. It’s bright at 385 nits, although several OLED displays I’ve reviewed recently are brighter. The Surface Pro 11‘s panel is an example at 533 nits. The OmniBook’s colors are wide at 100% of sRGB, 95% of AdobeRGB, and 100% of DCI-P3, with a color accuracy of Delta-E 0.67, which is excellent. The Surface Pro 11’s display is less colorful at 100%, 85%, and 97%, respectively, and its accuracy was around the same at 0.74.

Really, there’s nothing to complain about with this display. You’ll love it. Dual downward-firing speakers pump out loud audio with some distortion at full volume, and with crisp mids and highs but little bass. It’s pretty typical.

Performance

The OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 is the latest laptop I’ve reviewed running Intel’s Lunar Lake chipset. Specifically, it’s the Core Ultra 7 258V, a Series 2 chipset running at 17 watts. As such, it competes most directly against Intel’s previous 15-watt Core Ultra U-series, but in practice it’s the most immediate replacement for the 28-watt Core Ultra H-series processors.

Overall, Lunar Lake has shown itself to be faster than the U-series, which was also aimed at efficiency, and in some cases to be faster in single-core tasks than the H-series while around the same speed in multi-core. We see that with the OmniBook compared to the Spectre x360 14 running that Core Ultra 7 155H. Notably, the OmniBook is slower than laptops running Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chipsets, another efficiency-focused lineup. And then the Apple M3 has much faster single-core performance than all these laptops to go with very good multi-core performance.

The bottom line is that the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 is plenty fast for demanding productivity users. Its Intel Arc 140V graphics are faster than its predecessor, but not as fast as entry-level discrete GPUs. So, that means it won’t offer any advantages for creators or gamers.

Battery life

As I’ve stressed in each of my Lunar Lake laptop reviews, efficiency is the primary goal of this round of Intel’s chipsets. As we see above, performance doesn’t stand out, so battery life becomes more important. In part, that’s because of the excellent efficiency of Apple Silicon, with the M3 chipset being both fast and efficient.

Here, we see that the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 is a lot more efficient than the Spectre x360 14, especially in web browsing. It’s not quite as efficient as Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i and the Zenbook S 14, and the Qualcomm laptops are stronger as well.

The OmniBook is held back a bit by its 64-watt-hour battery, which isn’t huge, and it also sports a high-res, 120Hz OLED display. That also doesn’t help. And while it’s not as good as some others, it’s still a lot more efficient than most Intel Meteor Lake laptops. That means that while it can’t keep up with Apple’s M3, it will still likely get through a day’s work with moderate productivity workflows.

A worthy successor to one of our favorite 2-in-1s

The Spectre x360 14 was a great laptop, maybe the best example of the 360-degree convertible 2-in-1. With HP’s rebranding, I was wondering how much else would change with the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14. Fortunately, I didn’t have to worry too much.

There’s really not a lot to dislike about the OmniBook. It gets very good battery life, has a gorgeous OLED display, and it look and feels great. Its performance isn’t the best, but it’s fast enough, and its keyboard and touchpad are excellent. It’s most attractive, though, at its sale prices.