HP OmniBook Ultra Flip Review: Superb battery, though AI remains overhyped

The HP OmniBook Ultra Flip is sold on the promise of its AI inclusions – but it’s the battery life and great industrial design that make this laptop truly worthwhile.

Score: 3.5/5

In this review

HP OmniBook Ultra Flip Specifications
HP OmniBook Ultra Flip Design
HP OmniBook Ultra Flip Performance
HP OmniBook Ultra Flip Battery
HP OmniBook Ultra Flip Conclusion

Disclaimer: I strongly believe in an ethical approach to journalism, and that includes being transparent about whenever there is (or could be) a perceived conflict of interest.

HP has indicated to me that the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip used for this review is now mine to keep. I’m OK with this; my review of any device is never affected by whether or not it’s staying with me in any way. But I’m putting this upfront, not as a disclaimer at the base or anything like that so that it’s clear upfront.

Now, back to the review…

Design

Every time I pick up the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip, I have to remind myself that it’s a consumer laptop, not a business one – because HP’s definitely leaning heavily on its business laptop styling here.

The HP OmniBook Ultra Flip is built around a 14 inch 2880x1800 pixel OLED display with support for up to 120Hz refresh rates. That does give you the lovely colour presentation of OLED in a design that’s almost bezel-free.

One genuinely surprising touch here is the camera shutter, because, in full honesty, at first I figured there wasn’t one at all, because I couldn’t easily see it. It’s there, hidden in black bezel very neatly but easily located thanks to a ridged groove in its slider that makes it easy to maintain your privacy as and when needed.

The included webcam is a 9MP model that supports Windows Hello for biometric unlocking. It’s not exactly at a level where I’d want to shoot video for YouTube on it, excluding if it were my only option, but for home video calls or working from home zoom meetings, it’s functional enough, as is the inbuilt microphone array.

HP produces the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip in two colours – Eclipse Grey and Atmospheric Blue – with the supplied model I’ve tested being the Grey variant. Again, it reminds me more of HP’s business offerings in that colour, though there’s little to get too fussed about here.

It’s a plastic body laptop despite its somewhat metallic colour, but the build feels solid with a nice stiff rotating hinge that allows for your classic tablet and “tent” mode plays. I’m still waiting to find that moment where I need to prop a tablet up like a tent in my life; if it’s an essential part of your day please let me know how in the comments below.

The HP OmniBook Flip’s keyboard is nicely spaced out, though if you need a number pad it’s not going to suit your needs – but then that’s not a common inclusion on too many 14 inch laptops in the first place anyway. Key travel is reasonable and not too noisy, and if you’re not the Windows Hello camera type, the power button also acts as a fingerprint reader. You really can’t miss it either, thanks to both its lighting at the top and the fact that it’s a light blue key set against the rest of the dark grey keys on the keyboard.

The only issue I’ve had here from time to time is that the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip doesn’t always pick correctly that I’ve switched from tablet to laptop mode, re-enabling the keyboard and trackpad as it does so. That’s typically been solved by swinging the screen back and forth once to get it to behave, but it’s an annoyance I could do without.

The most unusual aspect of the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip is the ports… and that’s not something I usually say about a laptop!

Like many thin and light laptops, the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip isn’t blessed with a lot of ports – two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports and one more regular 10Gbps USB-C plus combo microphone/headphone jack is your lot – but it’s where HP has put most of them that makes the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip a little different.

You will find one USB-C port on the right hand side, and the headphone/mic port is on the left, so where are the other two ports hiding? They’re not on the back and they’re not on the front either. Instead, HP’s stuck them in diagonal cutouts on the rear right and left of the laptop.

It’s certainly different, but after a couple of weeks of testing I’m not convinced that different is enough. Even once you get past the odd muscle memory aspect of remembering where they are, for some devices, especially if they’ve got larger plug heads beyond the USB-C plug itself don’t always fit that well, or work nicely if you want to shift from laptop to tablet mode with the device still plugged in.

Performance

The HP OmniBook Ultra Flip as tested runs on an Intel Core Ultra 7 285V 2.2GHz processor with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, though as is so often the case, there’s a lot of configuration options open to you, including Core Ultra 5 or Ultra 9 processors and either 16GB or 32GB of RAM. As always, pricing will vary depending on the model you choose, and for that matter whether HP or other retailers are having a sale on that particular configuration. At the time of testing, the configuration supplied to me by HP would run $3,699.

The Core Ultra 7 (AKA “Lunar Lake”) processors are primarily meant to be focused on power efficiency, and they’re very much designed to take on the position that ARM-based Windows laptops will always have battery life superiority. More on that in the battery section below, but there’s typically a compromise to be had between power consumption and processor performance. Just how fast is the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip?

Here I am admittedly (but with an eye to transparency) working from a small data set of tested laptops to compare against. Here’s how the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip compared against a range of laptops; they’re certainly not all thin and light convertible laptops, but what I’m more interested in here is relative CPU performance.

First up, PC Mark 10, where I have exclude the ARM Windows crowd, because PC Mark 10’s primary benchmark still won’t run on those systems at the time of writing:

The HP OmniBook Ultra Flip isn’t the fastest you can get – and to be fair, that’s a small data set – but it’s certainly presenting enough processing power for the kinds of mobile worker and mid-level creative tasks that HP presents it as being capable of.
That’s backed up when considering how it does in GPU benchmarks, where I can include the ARM-based systems:

The HP is beaten out by the Acer Predator and Asus TUF A14 there, but you’d expect that, as both are specific gaming laptops with a very different form factor to the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip.

While the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip won’t be your high-end gaming rig of your dreams, it’s got enough to run mid-level or older titles, and maybe even some newer ones with the details dialled down a little. While it’s hardly the newest game out there, the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip managed an entirely respectable average 72fps in the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark mode.

The HP OmniBook Ultra Flip runs on Windows 11 Home with a small smattering of preinstalled apps and app offers from the likes of McAfee, Adobe and Dropbox. While I’m never that happy to see preinstalled apps per se – I’d rather decide what happens on my PC – it’s at least on the more minimal side here.

I did have a YouTube viewer query about running Ubuntu Linux on this specific machine, so I did try to manage a USB flash drive boot of that... with no success to date at getting past its secure boot layer. I don't want to say that it cannot run it -- I could be missing a step somewhere -- but it's certainly not an easy enterprise if it is indeed possible. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that most buyers of the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip probably aren't going to go down that path in any case.

The other big push for the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip is that while the styling is more akin to that of HP’s business laptops, this is meant to be a consumer unit with a focus on AI, because it’s 2024, and there are no products left that don’t include AI as part of the footprint.

This extends to Windows 11’s existing Copilot features, as well as the promise of future Copilot+ integrations. These work exactly as well as it does on other Copilot systems… which is to say that, as with much of the rest of the consumer-facing AI systems on offer, I’m not exactly blown away.

Yes, I have an inherent bias here against systems that do AI writing and image creation, but still, there’s a lot more promise and hype here than there is delivery of must-have features for most users, I feel.

HP does put its own spin on AI with its own HP AI companion, which declares itself to still be in beta. That does give it a little leeway for improvement, but at the same time, HP is shipping it to consumers, so it’s also worth examining on what it can do right now.
It features a conversational AI that does much of what everyone else’s conversational AI can do right now, a document analysis feature and an AI-led performance optimisation mode.

I can’t say that I’ve seen it pop up to let me know that it’s doing any AI-led work to make the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip more stable or faster during my review period… but maybe that’s the point, I shouldn’t have to, I guess? While I can appreciate that each laptop maker is trying to put their own spin on AI, I’m ultimately still left a little wanting.

Battery

HP’s claim around the battery life of the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip is that it’s capable of delivering up to 20 hours of battery life, but as always, those figures need to be taken with the proverbial grain of sodium chloride.

Any “up to” figure allows for a lot of interpretation, but at least HP’s upfront about that being a figure related to local video playback; you can expect less battery life if you’re busy using the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip to render video all day long.

But how much less? To set up some real-world comparative boundaries for this, I turn to my standard two laptop battery tests.

Firstly a softer test with local video playback – similar to HP’s test environment, though not likely to be identical – and then a much harder test using PCMark 10’s Gaming Battery benchmark. No, it’s still not a gaming laptop, but the point here is putting a heavy duty strain on the system to see how badly it performs under sustained load.

Here's how the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip compares using those two tests:

The HP OmniBook Ultra Flip did really well here; while the ARM efforts of the Microsoft and Dell Copilot+ Snapdragon laptops best it – and not by a small margin – for local video playback, it managed to beat out the Asus Vivobook S OLED’s ARM system, as well as many other tested laptops. 17 hours and 18 minutes isn’t 20 hours, to be pedantic, but it’s “up to”, and the fact that it managed just over 2 hours of battery life under the gaming battery benchmark is also worth noting.

What all of this boils down to is a laptop with a lot of battery muscle, and one that most users should find manages all-day battery life with ease.

Recharging is predictably via USB-C. Given there’s only that style of port it’s not surprising, and thankfully you can use any port you wish for this purpose.

HP provides a compact 65W USB-C charger with the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip to keep it powered up, and it’s worked nicely with a range of other chargers I’ve tested recently, including the Belkin BoostCharge Pro 140W 4-Port GaN Wall Charger and even the Laser 10,000mAh Outdoor Activity Powerbank, if only for a little while, because portable powerbanks aren’t really suitable for keeping laptops powered up for all that long.

HP OmniBook Ultra Flip: Alex’s Verdict

The single best aspect of the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip is its battery life, because it does show that you can have an x86 system with battery life that punches up towards that of ARM laptops, without all the emulation and compatibility headaches that ARM systems still drop you into.

The industrial design is mostly very nice; while the diagonal USB-C ports are more on the quirky-for-quirky’s sake for my tastes, this is otherwise a solidly built laptop with a good display screen and touch compatibility if that’s important to you.

However, it’s certainly not the most powerful laptop you can get for this kind of money, and that does mean you’ve got to weigh up your priorities carefully. It’s best suited for those who need a thin and light convertible laptop that’ll last the distance battery-wise, but where using higher-end, more processor intensive apps are going to be the exception, not the rule.

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HP OmniBook Ultra Flip: Pricing and availability

The HP OmniBook Ultra Flip as tested retails in Australia with pricing (at the time of writing) at $3,699, though lower cost models with less RAM and a slightly lower-spec processor are also available.

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