HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 review: Cool Copilot

AI laptops are seemingly all the rage these days. After reviewing the Alienware M16 R2 gaming laptop and the Asus Zenbook S16 laptop, I was curious to see what HP had to say in its first round of the AI Laptop Wars. After spending dozens of hours with it, it turns out there’s plenty to appreciate about the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 as a 2-in-1 laptop.

The HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 has a competitive starting price at $2,999 RRP, which is $400 pricier than the Alienware M16 R2 (although that is a gaming laptop with a dedicated GPU) but $500 cheaper than the Asus Zenbook S16.

HP sent me the Intel Core Ultra 7 version with 32GB to review, which retails for $3,699. Around that price in the 2-in-1 laptop space, you can get the Asus Zenbook Duo Evo for $3,999 (with an Intel Ultra 9 CPU) or the Ryzen 9-powered MSI Summit A16 for $3,599. Alternatively, the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2 costs $3,519 with a 2023 Intel i7-13700H processor, which reportedly has better performance albeit at about half the power efficiency of the Flip 14’s 2024 Ultra 7 CPU.

HP sent me the grey version of the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 to review, and it’s a sensory experience before you even flip the lid. The sandblasted anodised finish on the metal shell makes for a durable feel, with rounded front edges and angled back corners that provide a subtle but standout silhouette.

I usually ignore logos on laptops, but the four angled lines of the etched stylised HP logo add to the overall look and feel. Underneath you’ll find an exhaust grille as well as four spread-out downward-firing speakers, tuned by Poly Studio. Admittedly, the Ultra Flip 14 is a little light on ports—there are two 40Gbps USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, one USB-C port, and a 3.5mm audio jack—but, in fairness, I don’t know that there’s enough thickness on the bottom of the case to even support a USB-A port or Ethernet.

Despite the durable-feeling metal case, the Ultra Flip 14 weighs in at a light 1.34kg and is a whisker under 1.5cm when closed. Couple that with a 14-inch display that boasts a 90.04% screen-to-body ratio, and this is a very compact, portable package. Speaking of the display, the Ultra Flip 14’s 2.8K (2880x1800) OLED touchscreen is beautiful.

There’s a 0.2ms response time for responsive finger or digital pen inputs, plus a dynamic shifting between 48–120Hz depending on what you’re doing. As a 2-in-1 laptop, that ‘2’ part means you can fold the screen all the way back to the back of the chassis, which disables the keyboard for tablet mode. You don’t need to use a whole lot of force to rotate the screen, and it’ll auto-orient based on how you spin it.

Admittedly, I did have a few odd instances in laptop mode where I’d resume Widows only to find the display erroneously in landscape mode or upside down. Physically rotating the laptop upside down then back again fixed this every time, though. After the unreliability of the Asus Zenbook S16 for facial recognition, it was nice to have a webcam that reliably identified my mug every time, and a 9MP one at that (with up to 4K res). Better still are the inclusions of HP Enhanced Lighting (specifically, the ring light feature), but also the AI powered Poly Camera Pro for image enhancements, which make the overall video call experience great for people on the other end of their calls with you. The webcam privacy shutter is an appreciated touch, too.

And then there’s the keyboard and touchpad. The keyboard is full-size and backlit, and it never skipped a beat for me across hours of typing. While the function lock option seems reverse logic to me for trading out primary alternative functions for everyday f-key commands, I do like the thought that’s gone into what’s included for those functions. But it’s the opposite experience for the haptic touchpad which, frustratingly, had issues with all-important left clicks. Those clicks get stuck, especially whenever I press on the bottom-left corner of the touchpad, so I eventually resorted to untraining that muscle memory and clicking on the centre of the touchpad for left-click commands.

The HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 model I was sent had an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V CPU, which has eight cores, eight threads and boost up to 4.8GHz. This processor also comes with an Intel AI Boost NPU and integrated Intel Arc Graphics. Given my review model included 32GB of LPDDR5X-8533 MT/s RAM, it offered decent light to moderate gaming with up to 16GB of shared iGPU memory.

Don’t expect to play anything demanding at the native 2880x1800 resolution. While an Enthusiast processor, the best playable results in my tests came from dropping the resolution to 1080p and fidelity settings to low or medium in a lot of games. That said, games with FSR or Intel XeSS upscaling will help to bolster performance. Still, there’s fun to be had with new and recent classics like Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor or Vampire Survivors. Basically, if it’s older, indie or less demanding on hardware, it should be playable.

In our benchmarking tests, the Ultra Flip 14 had strong performance for single-core CPU benchmarks, ranking 4/14 for recently reviewed laptops in Geekbench and 2/9 in Cinebench. Multicore benchmark results were less impressive, particularly compared to the respective higher tier ‘9’ CPUs from Intel and AMD. Still, in terms of everyday computing, the Ultra Flip 14 proved a speedy operator for opening software (quickly) and seamless multitasking. If you want the top-of-the-line performance, go with the Ultra 9 spec.

On the AI front, the Ultra Flip 14 had the best application of the newfangled tech compared to other AI-branded laptops like the Asus Zenbook S16 and the Alienware M16 R2. Those latter two push Copilot over other AI applications, but the Ultra Flip 14 offers more. HP AI Companion has beta limitations, but its Performance Assistant and the option to dig into the docs you feed it are a great advantage over the more straightforward text-to-text or text-to-art responses from Copilot. I was also shown the open-source Intel AI Playground during my initial presentation, and it proved to be a promising locally running AI app in my tests, as well as a great alternative to the other mainstream options.

While those AI applications are a boon for the Ultra Flip 14, you may miss the preinstalled ones given they’re a couple of 20+ pieces of bloatware that come preinstalled with Windows 11. Despite all that bloatware, the Ultra Flip 14 managed 12 hours and 23 minutes of longevity in our 1080p YouTube video playback test with default settings. That’s almost 40 minutes more juice than the Asus Zenbook S16. In terms of recharging with the screen on, the Ultra Flip 14 managed 50% in 36 minutes and 99% in 109. That final percentage takes disproportionately longer to preserve battery health.

If you’re in the market for a new 2-in-1 laptop, particularly one with a focus on AI, the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 is worth considering. The sleek and slimline design hides plenty of practical everyday-computing power that’s made even more enjoyable via the 2.8K OLED screen.

There’s a lot of uniformity across the six builds, albeit with differences between the Intel Core Ultra processor and how much RAM you have. The cheapest has 16GB of RAM and an Intel Core Ultra 5 CPU, but a few hundred more bumps that to an Intel Core 7 CPU. If you want to game, though, the better pick is the sub-$3,000 build, which has an Intel Core Ultra 7 processor and 32GB of RAM (iGPU memory is shared). If you want even better performance, a couple of hundred bucks extra bumps the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 into Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU territory.