HP OmniBook Ultra Flip

Most people have very specific requirements for what what was once called an "ultrabook" should be able to do. And if you think about it, these requirements are pretty high to begin with. A very slim chassis made of high-quality materials, high battery life, and preferably without the machine generating too much heat or noise. It shouldn't be able to move mountains, but it should be used for retouching in Photoshop, or maybe even some simple video editing in Premiere. A good, responsive keyboard, a high-resolution display, preferably OLED, a large trackpad but without the overall package weighing too much.

Ouch - that's quite a checklist. But especially since Apple reintroduced the Air model and various Windows manufacturers have caught up, this checklist seems far less "out there" than just a few years ago. Take HP's OmniBook Ultra Flip for example, a laptop with a rather unsexy name, but which could really become the ultrabook aficionado's go-to with a little good will.

The entire chassis is anodised aluminium, it weighs just 1.3 kilos, and is no bigger than the 14" panel inside. Despite that, this is a "flip", which means the entire screen can be rotated around and used as a touch panel with an included stylus. It requires a more robust hinge, but it's only 1.49 centimetres thick. The only sacrifice here is ports, as there are only two Thunderbolt ports and a jack, which some might snort at.

Small, compact, beautifully constructed - good start, right? Inside, it gets even better. HP has squeezed a surprisingly well-designed keyboard in here, almost reminiscent of the Microsoft Surface line's almost legendary keys. They're soft, responsive and sit in a nice layout, and combined with a sharp fingerprint reader and a solid trackpad, it's a joy to use on a daily basis. In addition, it's equipped with a 14" OLED panel in 16:10. It runs at 2880x1800, i.e. 3K at 120Hz, and it has a variable refresh rate that can be throttled down to 48Hz to save power if necessary. The display is nicely colour calibrated, and our equipment gave us a Delta-E deviation of just 1.2, which should be on the good side for professional, colour-critical work.

We fly through the checklist from earlier, and somehow the good news just keeps on coming. HP itself promises over 20 hours of battery life, and while we couldn't quite replicate that, we got 16.5 hours via Arc Browser work, music via Spotify, some quick Photoshop and whatnot - making this arguably one of the best slim laptops we've tested, putting most ThinkPads to shame, which are both thicker and heavier but don't go nearly as far on a charge.

There's no skimping on specs as such, although you'll have to settle for integrated graphics, so even this compromise is easier to swallow in 2025. You get a 258-volt Intel Core Ultra 7 with 8 cores and 8 threads that can run up to 4.8GHz, integrated Intel Arc graphics, 32GB LPDDRX RAM (which is unfortunately soldered - yikes) and a 2TB NVMe SSD.

We didn't get to do too many individual benchmarks this time around, but in GeekBench 6 it scored quite high, at around 2740 in single-core, and 10,995 in multi-core - not bad at all. Browsing, multimedia, the Adobe suite to a limited extent - it's masterful at that task.

To be honest, this is one of the more complete slim laptops we've tested this year, and while Lenovo's ThinkPad chassis feels softer and nicer, and those machines' MIL-STD certifications ensure wider functionality in harsher conditions, HP can easily pat itself on the back here.