HP OmniBook X Flip 14 Assessment: Flip Flop

Convertible laptops proceed to develop in reputation, probably due to the distinctive flexibility they provide to of us who wish to swap up their use—shape-shifting amongst conventional pocket book, pill, and tappable leisure machine types. The most recent machine to enter this fray is HP’s OmniBook X Flip, out there in each 16-inch and 14-inch variations, the latter of which is what I used to be despatched to evaluate.

Its poor battery life and awkward design, nevertheless, make it fall wanting being among the many greatest 2-in-1 laptops I’ve examined, even when the value is sort of enticing.

Questionable Decisions

{Photograph}: Chris Null

At first look, it’s an unremarkable machine, utterly clad in silvery aluminum, interrupted solely by understated HP branding on the lid. However look nearer and also you’ll quickly see some design parts which may elevate an eyebrow.

It begins, oddly sufficient, with the underside of the laptop computer, which seems to be like an angled pedestal upon which the keyboard rests. It additionally makes the laptop computer seem thicker than it’s, although at 19 mm (0.75 inches) thick, it’s truly about common for the 14-inch class. (The three.1-pound weight, nevertheless, is relatively heavy, and it feels as such within the hand.)

The opposite huge twist is the keyboard. Slightly than that includes the island-style keys ubiquitous in the present day, the OmniBook X Flip has its keys all run collectively, with only a sliver of house between every of them. This makes every key only a bit bigger than regular, and whereas that will sound useful, I discovered it made for a barely tougher touch-typing expertise as I by accident hit two keys directly extra typically than anticipated. It additionally seems to be decidedly bizarre, too, a surefire love-it-or-hate-it retro look that distinctly jogged my memory of some computer systems from the Nineteen Eighties.

A Poor Performer

{Photograph}: Chris Null

HP swaps Intel for AMD on the 14-inch OmniBook X Flip (although the 16-inch mannequin makes use of Intel CPUs), and the mannequin reviewed is without doubt one of the higher-end configurations out there, together with an AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 CPU with AMD Radeon 860M graphics, 32 GB of RAM, and a 1-terabyte SSD.