HP Omnibook Ultra Flip Review

Introduction

The HP Omnibook Ultra Flip 14 adds some welcome power to a convertible laptop with a sublime OLED screen.

As well as providing a 14-inch 3K OLED panel, this laptop also comes with a potent Intel Core Ultra 7 256V processor, a 1TB SSD and 16GB of RAM, as well as solid endurance.

The problem here is the eye-watering £1799/$1599.99 price tag, which pits it against more powerful rivals such as the Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024) and the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025), as opposed to the Asus ProArt PZ13-style convertibles that are a fair bit less expensive.

I’ve been testing the Omnibook Ultra Flip 14 for the last couple of weeks to see how well it fares against that key competition.

Design and Keyboard

• Fantastic look and feel
• One-dimensional ports
• Tactile keyboard and huge trackpad

The Omnibook Ultra Flip 14 looks sublime in this deep, dark blue colourway I have here, echoing the likes of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 (2024). It’s a smart-looking piece, while also being solid thanks to its metal chassis. 

Against the other Omnibook models, this option also benefits from slimmer bezels around its display to help its modern aesthetic. Its 1.34kg weight also keeps it quite light for a laptop of its size, while it is reasonably easy to take on any work trips and put into a bag, as I had to on some work trips to London.

The port selection though, as is seemingly becoming commonplace for these HP Omnibooks, leaves a bit to be desired. The left side has a USB-C and headphone jack, while the right side features another two USB-Cs. Nothing else – no Micro SD reader, HDMI, or even a USB-A legacy connector that’s on the other two Omnibooks. This makes the Omnibook Ultra Flip 14 feel more like a MacBook Air M4 than anything else, although not necessarily for the right reasons. 

The shallow, smaller layout keyboard is similar to the other 14-inch Omnibook models, although is a tad dampened against the Omnibook X 14 and Ultra 14 options. It is nonetheless tactile and easy to get up to speed on, and comes with a sensible layout for a compact laptop. It is backlit with a decent white backlight to help this laptop’s suitability for after-dark working.

Where this Omnibook Flip 14 definitely wins against the competition is with its obscenely large trackpad that gives my fingers nearly as much real estate as with my larger 16-inch MacBook Pro. It responds well to tactile inputs and responsive tracking, too.

Display

• Sublime OLED screen
• Virtually perfect colours
• Decent speakers

HP, in line with similar laptops or convertibles from Asus and Lenovo, has shipped the Omnibook Ultra Flip 14 with a striking, high-res OLED screen. It comes with a 14-inch 3K resolution (2880×1800) 120Hz option that’s as equally dazzling with its high resolution as it is with its smooth refresh rate.

Given this is an OLED, we’re getting brilliant contrast and the signature deep, inky blacks thanks to a rated 27070:1 contrast ratio and 0.01 black level with my trusty colorimeter. Its 6600K colour temperature is also bang-on, while it’s a reasonably responsive touchscreen.

With this laptop being more squarely aimed at creatives than generalists, the fact that its colour accuracy is virtually perfect across the board is even more useful. My colorimeter measured perfect coverage of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 colour spaces at 100%, while the 93% Adobe RGB result also proves this panel’s adeptness for both productivity and colour-sensitive workloads.

The 370.9 nits of peak SDR brightness means it is lacking in some punch against the competition, though. You can use this laptop inside and out with that brightness, though, if needed.

The Omnibook Ultra Flip 14’s speaker array is decent, but not brilliant. There is both good volume and depth that makes them fine for casual listening.

Performance

• Intel Core Ultra  7 256V provides good performance
• Beefy integrated graphics against Arm-based laptops
• Fast and reasonably capacious SSD

My sample of the Omnibook Ultra Flip 14 came with Intel’s Core Ultra 7 256V chip inside, which is an eight-core and eight-thread chip split evenly between Intel’s Performance and Efficiency cores. It’s the same chip as you’ll find in Samsung’s Galaxy Book 5 Pro.

It provides generally potent single-core performance in the likes of Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 that does a good job of going toe-to-toe with the Snapdragon X Elite that’s inside Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 (2024).

Its more conventional form factor also means it’s a lot stronger than the ProArt PZ13 from Asus, whose tablet-like chassis led to meagre performance for its price. However, similarly priced MacBooks with M3 and M4 chips will clean house against HP.

Another win for the Omnibook Ultra Flip 14, thanks to its Core Ultra 7 256V power station, is its more potent integrated graphics with a score that more than doubles the sub-2000 scores seen in comparably priced Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops in the 3DMark Time Spy test.

This makes HP’s laptop a lot better-suited to more intensive tasks, such as photo or video editing or even some lighter gaming loads where that extra graphical horsepower is going to be appreciated.

This configuration comes with 16GB of RAM for decent headroom for multi-tasking and the more intensive tasks, while its 1TB SSD is capacious enough for lots of apps and storing any media libraries on-board for video editing, for instance.

Its measured read and write speeds of 7040.38MB/s and 5570.52MB/s respectively make this a snappy drive for accessing files and booting into Windows, taking it as far as one of the faster drives I’ve tested on a non-gaming machine.

Software

• Reasonably clean Windows 11 install
• Some HP apps are preinstalled
• Also comes with Copilot+ PC functionality, for better or worse

The Omnibook Ultra Flip 14 comes running Windows 11, and with a range of software pre-installed with the likes of Intel Unison for easy file transferring and McAfee antivirus.

It also comes with a range of HP-specific software, such as HP Support Assistant, which allows you to check on your system’s vitals and fiddle with settings such as audio and performance modes.

An AI companion app is pinned to the taskbar on initial setup and provides a means of accessing HP’s AI assistant features, such as writing copy in a specific style or enabling features such as noise reduction and auto framing for conferencing.

Elsewhere, this is also a Copilot+ PC and has enough AI power to warrant the inclusion of Microsoft’s own tools. Chief among these is the addition of the Copilot assistant, which you can ask questions and to undertake tasks, if you so wish.

In addition, there is also generative AI functionality baked into the Photos and Paint apps, if you want it. The most useful set of AI tools with the Omnibook X 14 is the Windows Studio effects for the webcam, which provides convenient means of auto framing, background blur and even for making sure you maintain eye contact.

Microsoft is still touting its controversial Recall feature with these Copilot+ PCs, and even if it isn’t on the Omnibook Ultra Flip 14 at the time of writing, it is labelled as ‘coming soon’.

The idea of it is that it takes screenshots of your screen every few seconds so you can look back and remember things you’ve looked at, even if you haven’t manually bookmarked them or used the Snipping Tool to take a screenshot. Due to privacy concerns, it remains for Windows Insiders, and it seems to need some ironing out before it gets released into the wild.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 14 hours 45 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for between one and two working days

The Omnibook Ultra Flip 14 features a 59Whr cell inside, which seems on the smaller side for a laptop of its kind. With this in mind, it managed to last for 14 hours and 46 minutes in the PCMark10 battery life test, with the brightness at the requisite 150 nits.

That’s enough endurance to get you nearly through two full working days away from the mains, although it falls short against the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen (2024) that managed just shy of 17 hours, while the Asus ProArt PZ13 kept on chugging to 18 hours and 15 minutes.

The 65W USB-C charger that the Omnibook Ultra Flip 14 comes with is at least quite quick in giving you that valuable juice back, taking just 33 minutes to get it from dead to 50% charge, while a full charge is under an hour and a half at 85 minutes.

Should you buy it?