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- Bright matte-finish touchscreen
- Long battery life
- Excellent keyboard
- Glacial SSD write speeds
- 60Hz display refresh rate
- No space for extra storage
The new HP EliteBook X Flip G1i is a 14in 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 such a thing over a conventional, and cheaper, laptop with a touchscreen.
The reasons for doing so are twofold. Writing or drawing on such a display is much easier when you don’t have to reach over a keyboard, and it’s more convenient to watch content in tight spaces when you don’t have a keyboard getting in the way. If either of those practical advantages appeals to you, the HP EliteBook X Flip G1i is one of the strongest choices for business use around.
What you need to know
HP’s latest EliteBook is a beautiful example of a laptop that manages to be all things to all users, but it will primarily appeal to business users. The touchscreen and convertible form factor mean you can use it as a tablet, albeit one that is three times the weight and thickness of an iPad Pro, as well as ‘tent’ it for use in a confined space, like on a seat-back tray.
The Intel Series 2 Lunar Lake CPU gives it a winning combination of performance and endurance, while the high-quality sound system, webcam and display make it very handy for media consumption and communication. Wrap all that up in a solid aluminium shell with a wider-than-usual selection of I/O ports, and you have a laptop that should satisfy even the most demanding user.
Price and competition
The HP EliteBook X Flip G1i comes in two flavours, and the only difference is the capacity of the SSD. For £1,668, you get 512GB, while £1,836 gets you 1TB. That storage price difference isn’t quite as rapacious as it is with Apple’s MacBook Air, but it’s too close for comfort.
If you don’t need the convertible form-factor, then HP’s regular HP EliteBook X G1i lineup offers a much wider range of options, and you don’t need to forgo a touchscreen, which is an option.
Dell’s pitch to the well-heeled businessman is the impressive Dell Pro 13 Premium, which boasts a superb 8MP webcam, a distinctive zero-lattice keyboard, and a battery life of over 21 hours. It’s a little on the expensive side, with the 14in model costing over £1,900 without a touchscreen.
If you can live without the AI features that come with Copilot+ badging, then the Honor MagicBook Pro 14 has a lot to recommend it. The Core Ultra 9 285H CPU lacks the 48 TOPS Lunar Lake NPU, but is more powerful, while the 120Hz 3.2K OLED touchscreen is one of the best fitted to any laptop. At just £1,000 at the time of writing, it’s superb value.
One of the first Core Ultra S2 laptops we tested, the Asus Zenbook S14, continues to impress. It’s a design classic, and the build quality is top-notch. The 2.8K 120Hz OLED touchscreen is a match for the Honor MagicBook Pro 14, and that’s saying something. Currently, you can purchase the S14 for a mere £999.
While it no longer dominates the class, Apple’s M4 MacBook Air is still a great buy and a thoroughly impressive bit of kit. The display is great, as is the keyboard, though Apple is still having a laugh with its storage costs: at £1,199, the 512GB model is £200 more than the 256GB version.
Design and features
Even the most cursory toying with this EliteBook shows it to be a premium product. The all-aluminium construction lends it an impressive feeling of solidity with precious little flex in either the lid or the keyboard deck.
The design is smart, clean and frippery-free as befits a laptop aimed more at the business than home user. HP lists two colourways: Atmosphere blue and Glacier silver, but only the latter seems to be available in the UK. MIL-STD-810H compliance means the new ExpertBook isn’t just a pretty face.
Vitally for a convertible, the hinges that join the lid and the base are very solid and have a stiff action, so the screen stays exactly where you put it, whether in tent or tablet mode. A convertible with slack screen hinges is no use to anyone.
Given the all-aluminium build, the weight of 1.4kg isn’t too shabby, though it’s still the equivalent of two-and-a-bit iPad Pro 13s, so using it as a tablet can get rather wearisome.
HP reckons the EliteBook is only 14.7mm thick at the back, but according to my measurements, it’s 20mm on the nose. Not excessive for a 2-in-1 but still chunkier than the Dell and Honor competition, let alone the skinny MacBook Air.
HP has done a good job with the I/O port selection. On the left side, there are two Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI 2.1 video output and a 3.5mm audio jack, while on the right, there’s a third, albeit 10Gbps, USB-C port, a 5Gbps USB-A port and a SIM card tray.
All three of the USB-C ports support DisplayPort video output and PD charging, which means you can charge from either side and still have two USB-C ports free. That will do very nicely. Wireless communications are bang up to date thanks to the Intel BE201 card, which supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.
As it does for many of its laptops, HP has posted a handy video detailing how to get inside the EliteBook X Flip G1i and perform basic jobs like replacing the battery, the SSD, the speakers and the wireless module and even some more advanced tasks such as replacing the touchpad, the display and the heatsink. However, this being a Lunar Lake Series 2 machine, there’s no option to add more RAM, nor can you add a second SSD.
With an eye on security-conscious business users, the EliteBook X Flip has a fingerprint scanner built into the power button and a Windows Hello IR facial recognition camera.
Though HP doesn’t bundle a pen with the EliteBook X Flip, it does still have a magnetic palmrest so you can attach one like the HP Active Pen.
Keyboard, touchpad and webcam
I could find no fault with the EliteBook’s keyboard. It’s very pleasant to the touch, the typing action is light but precise, and there’s very little give in the deck even when you push down hard on the F/G/H keys. The white-on-grey keycap graphics are a model of clarity, and the two-stage white backlight works a treat.
At 120 x 85mm, the EliteBook’s glass touchpad offers 16.5% more surface area than the Dell Pro 13 Premium’s, and it feels better to use, which is saying something because the Dell’s touchpad is pretty good. The EliteBook’s touchpad is one of the most perfectly damped and quiet I’ve encountered.
The 1440p webcam is also excellent. Images are sharp, bright and naturally colourful, and it takes the contrast issues caused by bright lights in its stride. I’m not going to say it’s the best webcam I’ve encountered in a laptop, but it’s certainly one of them.
HP bundles the Poly Camera Pro app on the EliteBook X Flip, which adds a whole raft of features and filters, many “AI-enhanced” naturally, such as virtual backgrounds, image flip and a surprisingly effective ersatz spotlight, to the standard ones that come bundled in the Microsoft Studio Effects package.
Display and audio quality
While all EliteBook X Flip G1i’s come with a 1,920 x 1,200 IPS screen, you’re able to select whether you want 400cd/m2 or 800cd/m2 maximum brightness and either a BrightView (glossy) or anti-glare (matte) finish.
The 800cd/m2 models feature HP’s Sure View 5 privacy screen, which is designed to make it harder for people peering over your shoulder to see the screen. That’s what the high brightness level is for: to compensate for the dimming effect of the privacy filter, not to melt your eyeballs. My test machine came with the 400cd/m2 anti-glare screen, but the display still managed to hit 532cd/m2, which is good for a laptop IPS panel.
The display demonstrated a maximum native colour reproduction of 115.6% sRGB (equivalent to 81.9% DCI-P3 and 79.6% AdobeRGB), which is broadly the same as the panel fitted to the Dell Pro 13 Premium. Colour accuracy was acceptable for a laptop not aimed directly at creative types, with a Delta E variation of 1.7 against the sRGB profile.
Despite having a matte finish that did a good job of keeping reflections at bay both indoors and out, the screen feels very smooth to the touch, which makes for a satisfyingly fluid touchscreen experience. The only quibbles I have with the display are the standard 60Hz refresh rate and the lack of support for HDR content.
The sound system comprises four speakers: two tweeters that fire up through the grilles that flank the keyboard and two full-range drivers that fire out of slots at the very front of the chassis below the palmrest. HP doesn’t quote a power output, but given that the system registered 79.5dBA on my sound meter at a 1m distance from a pink noise source, volume is most certainly not a problem.
The soundscape the speakers present is detailed, tight and focused, with plenty of bass, though it’s not as mellifluous as the sound made by, for instance, the MacBook Air. I can see, or rather, hear, why HP has done this: the EliteBook has a speaker system that can cut through a noisy office environment to be easily heard, albeit at the expense of the last degree of tunefulness.
Performance and battery life
The EliteBook X Flip is built on the same Intel Core Ultra 7 258V platform as the Dell 14 Plus, which means you get an octa-core Lunar Lake chip with four performance cores, four efficiency cores and a maximum turbo clock speed of 4.8GHz.
The CPU is backed up by 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM, which, as with all Lunar Lake CPUs, is integrated into the CPU package. There’s also a 1.95GHz Intel Arc 140V GPU built in and a 47 TOPS NPU for running local AI jobs such as Recall, Studio Effects, Live Captions and Paint Cocreator.
In our 4K multimedia benchmark, the EliteBook scored 291 points, which puts it nicely ahead of both the Dell 14 Plus, which scored 249, and the MacBook Air (247) and even ahead of the Core Ultra 268V-powered Dell Pro 13 Premium (285), which, on paper at least, is slightly more powerful.
The EliteBook also has the Dell Pro 13 Premium beaten in the SPECviewperf 3dsmax graphics test. The margin, 27.3fps vs. 26.4fps, is very small, but the Dell has a slightly more powerful GPU, so you would expect it to beat the HP.
Performance does drop off a little when under heavy stress. After 10 minutes, the CPU utilisation dropped to 60% but in the EliteBook’s favour, fan noise never rose much above a whisper.
No matter which way you look at it, the EliteBook is a very tidy little performer, and better yet, that performance hasn’t come at the expense of battery life. In our standard rundown test, the EliteBook lasted for an impressive 20hrs 2mins on a full charge of its 68Wh battery. In the comparator group, only the Dell did better, while the MacBook Air came in a distant last. How times have changed.
The one area where the EliteBook trips over its shoelaces is storage speed. The average sequential read speeds of the 512GB SK hynix SSD were reasonable at 3,449MB/s, but the average write speeds were pedestrian in the extreme at 996MB/s.
That’s a truly dismal performance, even compared to a budget laptop like the HP Pavilion SE 14, and caused me to try some different benchmark tools, which all told much the same story. The fact that most users won’t notice such slow write speeds in everyday use isn’t the point.
Verdict
The new EliteBook X Flip G1i is one of the most rounded compact business laptops currently on the market. Strong points include the excellent webcam, trio of USB-C ports, long battery life, impressively engineered keyboard and touchpad and the bright non-reflective IPS display.
The only failing worth mentioning is the slow SSD write speeds, but the average user is unlikely to notice that. At under £1,700, it’s good value too when compared to the Dell Pro 13 Premium, which is the most obvious competitor we’ve tested recently.
