HP Omnibook Ultra Flip 14: Slim, Grey, Long-Lasting

Why you can trust Creative Bloq
Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.

HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 Review

Key specifications

Design, build and display

Bland design, nicely thin and light

Grey and rectangular could sum up a great many laptops since the sad demise of the G3 iBook, but the HP OmniBook Ultra is particularly so. There’s nothing wrong with this per se, and it does have HP’s cut-off corners so that you can plug in a USB-C cable on the corner, which can really help with having cables snaking across your desk into the side of your laptop. There’s nothing to mark it out apart from a black HP logo on the dark grey background and the word ‘OmniBook’ written in white on one of the hinges. It’s what you might call minimal.

Open it, up and beyond the Intel sticker and the blue power button/fingerprint reader it’s more of the same – shades of grey with a white backlight. Thank goodness, then, for the OLED touchscreen, which produces the brightness and contrast typical of this display technology – though it does suffer from the common OLED flaw of being rather reflective, as well as a dust and fingerprint magnet.

Being a 2-in-1, you can fold the OmniBook’s screen back to produce some sort of Star Trek-like datapad, with Windows 11 adapting itself nicely to the new orientation, or place it hinge upward like a tent. It’s a good stiff chassis, made from plastic sand aluminium, and doesn’t bend when you hold it by the corner. Size-wise, there are certainly slimmer machines out there, but at just 1.5cm thick, it’s hardly a chonker.

Design score: 3/5

Features

No USB-A, OLED touchscreen

The HP OmniBook Ultra Flip has taken the opportunity to ditch any USB-A ports, which almost certainly means you’ll need an adapter for some of your devices unless you want to invest in new cables (or new devices). The good news is that two of the three USB-C ports are Thunderbolt 4, so they can be used for a dock or to connect to a display with a hub, while the third is USB 3.2 10Gbps and is easily identifiable by the logo next to it. It’s a versatile port setup, though it does assume you have up-to-date peripherals and screens, or a love of daisy-chaining dongles. At least you get the latest wireless standards for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

The keyboard isn’t the OmniBook Ultra’s finest feature. It’s a decent size but has been made very thin to keep the laptop’s size down, and the keys have very little travel as a result. It has a nice five-inch touchpad, however, which we found to be responsive, though it has a nasty habit of suddenly stopping working if the laptop erroneously detects that it’s been put into tablet mode. This happened when the screen was pushed back beyond a certain point, so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem unless you’re in the habit of using your laptop in a slightly unusual position.

As is typical of OLEDs, the screen gives an excellent account of itself, displaying 100% of