HP OmniBook Ultra Flip: Reddit's Verdict on the Spectre Heir

Omnibook Ultra is great. Lots of people here hate on HP but their high end stuff is fantastic.

After a few weeks of testing, I'm glad to report that the clean reinstallation significantly improves the battery life from 12-13% per hour to 7-8% per hour under light use (Edge + VScode + OneNote in foreground).

I was testing out laptops at best buy and I almost bought one just because the keyboard was exceptional. I loved typing on it so much but the price was too much.

OK starting with the good, wow, just wow, I can't say enough good things about the hardware on this machine, it is quite literally the best I've ever owned/used and that includes my Macbook Pro 14. This is just a wonderful machine and HP really knocked it out of the park.

I got the omnibook last month. Never look back. It's good. Feels good. Looks good. Performance good for daily. Pen is good. Keyboard good. Everything seems good. No complaint.

No it is not better than the Spectre. I had one and returned it after a couple days, having owned the Spectre from earlier this year build quality felt a little lacking to me. It has a nearly identical form factor, but trades the top mounted speakers for bottom firing, the keyboard while still nice, felt a little cheaper. I'm not sure if it's the coating used or some other factor, but it had a toy-like feel to them.

Apparently drivers etc have been fixed, as mine had absolutely no issues setting up. Fantastic haptic touchpad, oled screen, and keyboard. Overpriced, but nice laptop.

Before 6~7 hours. Now 10~12 hours. And I just received a new Bios update through the Windows update. I hope this improves the battery more. But never reach 16 hours as they claim. My brightness is always 50%.

I have the exact same impression with mine. 258V, 32/2 version. I managed to improve it a bit by removing some software but...not by much.

I bought the 2024 spectre and replaced it with the omnibook ultra flip when it went on sale last week. The omnibook is noticeably lighter, and GPU performance is at least 50% more powerful. I'm still not sure how I feel about the bottom-facing speakers. They do get slightly muffled on my bed, but sound great on a hard surface, or in tent or tablet mode.

I received my new replacement OmniBook Ultra Flip and this device does not have the Bluetooth problem that the previous laptop had. It is working great with Windows 11 24H2 and I agree with all the positives listed in the review!

Buyer's beware. Received mine today and did a fresh install of Windows. It immediately bricked the touchpad. I have run all Windows updates, installed Support Assist and the model is not listed on their support page so manually installing drivers is not available either. I'm stuck with a new laptop with no usable trackpad or external mouse.

Problem solved. OP shared the product page with the drivers which mostly solved the issues. Still can't detect the camera but I haven't troubleshot that yet. Most important features are working - trackpad, touchscreen and USB ports.

I have tested thunderbolt docks, connected multiple external monitors, ethernet, usb drives and everything worked for me. No BT issues or BSOD. Everything works as expected.

Yes, it's a really nice laptop. I think everything about it is pretty much perfect, except the battery life could be better.

I prefer the HP to the surface laptop 7. For me, the keyboard on the HP Omni book is amazing (and even better than the already good surface laptop 7 keyboard, which I feel requires just a little too much pressure to press with a spongier feel rather than a tactile feel of the HP. Furthermore, the 14-inch size of the HP vs the 13.6-inch size of the Surface does make a difference in terms of ergonomics.

I cannot for the love of god get this laptop over 10 hrs battery life. Even with a fresh windows install.

The multicore performance difference is negligible, and I'd argue nonexistent for 90% of use cases. The GPU performance is much much better. In newer titles it performs better than the GTX 1650. You're also getting better battery life even when doing intensive tasks. I haven't noticed the difference in multicore performance.

I returned a week later. While it replaced the Spectre, it definitely cut a few corners from a quality standpoint. The keyboard and track pad both were a step back and general performance was shaky. Using Google docs and having about 10 tabs open for research would cause it to chug. I would be typing and it would take several seconds for it to appear on screen.

It's an OLED. I am used to that from the Yoga too, and I do have an OLED TV as main monitor on my desktop. The Omnibook supports 120hz. It uses DC dimming which softens the issues of PWM slightly.

I bought one last week and Linux works flawlessly. Battery, touchscreen, touchpad, audio, webcam. The only thing I haven't tested yet are the fingerprint reader and the gyroscope, but it looks promising for the fingerprint reader.

I wish oems would just ship vanilla windows and a small partition with drivers. I'd pay extra for a bullshit-free experience.

The BT issues were still present just not as bad and I was also getting some BSODs. And yes the thunderbolt issues were still there too. I still think this is mostly Intel's fault, bad drivers on a new platform and all.

It's a great machine - just got mine. Super keyboard. Just a warning - I came from a Dell XPS with anti-reflection screen. The OmniBook is super reflective and very distracting - but you can purchase after market anti-reflex film.

For the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip, it's a fantastic price. Its cheapest sale price is $1169 new currently, and that was already a good deal. This is the successor to the Spectre 14 x360, which is HP's premium line and one of the best two-in-one laptops on the market.

Bought this instead of a Samsung tab. Definitely what I've been waiting on with this screen.

I've had my omnibook UF 14 256v for around 8 months now. I did NOT do a clean install or anything like that, I only disabled the startup hp apps. I get around 6-8 hours on a full charge. 6 hours if I'm doing work and have various apps open at once (vscode, youtube, word, edge), and 8 hours if I enable efficiency mode on battery and only have around two or three apps open at once.

I have had it for almost 2 months now. Still going strong. 120hz refresh rate is great. My phone is also 120hz plus oled as well, so I am used to both. This was a step up to my old spectre. Slightly larger screen aspect ratio, more ram, more storage, higher refresh rate and better screen resolution.

I own the Omnibook Ultra Flip 2024. I've heard the keyboard is worse than the Spectre, but still completely fine for my use. Speakers sound fine. I think the battery life on the Lunar Lake is not as impressive as I was hoping. I haven't tried any Snapdragon PCs, but it's definitely worse than my M3 Macbook.

I would definitely recommend the Omnibook Ultra Flip. It's not a lot more to pay for a new generation and unless you actually need specifically multicore performance the Core Ultra 256V is much better for most users.

Omnibook has 2-in-1 so you can use it with pen tablet-like but bit heavier but not a lot. I loved ultra 7 256v more than prev intel, due to the battery performing - no serious gaming but very old games. Smooth running and etc!

Omnibook has Intel gen2 chip, battery and iGPU should be even better. I would get that for sure if Spectre is not on some major sale, it's one year behind.

I have this laptop and I don't recall having any of these issues on my unit. I haven't used the Bluetooth a lot, but the laptop always turned off correctly and using with an external monitor connected to a dock, also worked flawlessly all the time. However, my experience is with a fresh windows installation. I barely used the HP full of bloatware that came originally.

This was defective or you just didn't set it up properly (skill issue). I own the machine and it is fantastic, best windows machine I've ever used.

Buy a Bluetooth 5.4 or 5.3 USB dongle on Amazon and a USB-A to USB-C adapter to plug it into the laptop or a USB hub connected to your computer. I've had Bluetooth issues with my OmniBook Ultra Flip as well and the Bluetooth Dongle solved everything.

I really like it! It looks great, performs really well, and has (compared to my previous laptop) amazing battery life. The only complaint I have is that a USB A port would've been nice, but I don't feel too bad about getting a dongle for when I need one.

I got one a few days ago. Other than the lack of auto-rotation, it's an excellent Linux 2-in-1. The fingerprint reader worked out of the box, and I got the IR camera working with Howdy for facial recognition with minimal tinkering. I have configured it for dual-boot with all of my employer's corporate spyware contained on the Windows partition and all of my personal computing on Fedora.

The touchpad is not good. The surface is not smooth and it's hard to track. It also is quite large, and tbh makes it awkward to move your pointer.

I just picked up the model with the 256v and am also not loving the battery life. I also have a Omnibook X with Snapdragon and that easily gets me 10 hours even while blasting away with multiple tabs on Chrome. I was hoping to move to something more premium but this might not be the answer.

The Omnibook will have better cpu/gpu performance and efficiency, but you lose a lot of the nice features that the spectre had. The Omnibook has no usb type a port, doesn't have face unlock, and it only has downfiring speakers as opposed to the spectre with speakers on the keyboard deck.

I would add that apple consistently has software issues with new tech, the iphone 16 for example has had issues with touch just not working until restarted and the MacBooks having similar freeze issues which you have minimal control over until apple releases an update. I think Microsoft/Intel/HP will figure it out sooner rather than later.

Omnibook's battery life is decent at most. It can last all day, or around 7 hours screen on in my case. I got rid of some of the bloatware, but some people said fresh install gives you boost on performance and battery, but I haven't done that.