The HP EliteBook X Flip G1i offers peace of mind to paranoid professionals who crave mobile working

Conventional enterprise laptops can often feel bland and stuffy, but the HP EliteBook X Flip G1i offers something a little different. The Lunar Lake-powered 2-in-1 hybrid adopts a sleek and stylish design aesthetic while packing plenty of the same enterprise features you would expect from the Elitebook series – namely, it's similar to the clamshell HP EliteBook laptops.

The key difference here, of course, is the 360-degree hinges that can transform your device into a tablet at a moment's notice, whether you want to use it as a touchscreen or a second display in your setup. Helpfully, it's also a little lighter and trimmer, making it a great option for mobile working, especially for those working with sensitive material. Questions remain as to whether its display is strong and vibrant enough to justify being used as a tablet and whether its battery life offers more than the clamshell version, so you can rely on this 2-in-1 when away from the desk.

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HP EliteBook X Flip G1i: Design and display

HP's design aesthetic for its EliteBook family is clean and sophisticated, and the manufacturer brings the same minimalist look and feel to the EliteBook X Flip G1i. It's practically indistinguishable from its cousins, including the likes of the EliteBook 8 G1i or the EliteBook X G1i. Although you aren't likely to stand out from the crowd, there's no reason to be disappointed with a clean and elegant overall look. The silver aluminum chassis exudes freshness, while its rounded corners give it a softer and more accessible feel – akin to that you might feel when using a MacBook.

Its dimensions are consistent with what we'd expect from a machine like this, and impressively, it's even thinner than the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition (which doesn't feature an HDMI port). But its weight is on the heavy side at 1.4kg. For instance, Lenovo's 2-in-1 is 1.32kg, and the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 is 1.34kg.

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Generally, the device is well constructed and robust, which is the least you could ask for. That's the case whether you're using it as a laptop or if you bend the display back and use it in a variety of tablet modes. The one element that's a bit of a letdown is that the display does feel a tad loose when you tap it too firmly. This is still within the bounds of acceptability – and it's certainly an issue in most 2-in-1s – but firming this up would have given the EliteBook that extra edge.

The display itself isn't completely flush against the lid and instead features a plastic outline that protrudes slightly. Although visually unappealing, it's smart in the sense that it prevents the screen from being marked by the keyboard when shutting it – which it does with a firm snap thanks to the magnetics. Another oddity is that the end of the lid and the main body don't fully line up. It's a minor, and mostly visual, complaint, rather than a functional one, but it stood out nonetheless.

Our feelings about the display itself are generally mixed. The review unit we tested featured an entry-level 1,900 x 1,200 IPS screen with HDR and a 60Hz refresh rate – although you can also buy this laptop with a 2.5K (2,560 x 1,600-pixel) panel with a much smoother 120Hz refresh rate. Both are stated to be 400 nits bright (a little above average), but we imagine the user experience differences are stark, with added sharpness and smoothness rendering it a much better proposition.

The version of the display that we tested, however, only reached 316 cd/m2, which is a little below average. Color accuracy had a better showing with an excellent 100% coverage of the sRGB gamut, backed up by an excellent 76.4% and 88.1% coverage of the Adobe and DCI-P3 gamuts, for photo and video editing, respectively (where scores above 70% and 80% indicate adequacy for professional color work). This pairs with an outstanding 0.18 black level and relatively high 1,694:1 contrast ratio (great results in a non-OLED screen). Capping this off is a 0.29 average Delta-E result and a maximum of 1.05, generally in line with the best laptop displays.

HP EliteBook X Flip G1i: Performance and battery life

Powering the HP EliteBook X Flip G1i is an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor and an Intel Arc Graphics chip alongside 32GB LPDDR5X RAM and a 1TB SSD. The integrated NPU can also squeeze out a decent 47 TOPS, which is enough to power most innate AI workloads. Unfortunately for the Lunar Lake generation, power is a little compromised for the sake of efficiency – and that's something we certainly noticed in testing this 2-in-1.

Testing this machine using Geekbench 6 produced a single-threaded result of 2,464 and a multi-core score of 10,239. It's not much of a leap from machines built in 2023 and beyond. For example, the last HP Spectre x360 14 scored 2,110 and 10,480 with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H chip. But this model only offered 11 TOPS of AI power and a comparatively weak GPU. By contrast, the EliteBook X Flip G1i's graphics card scored a solid 28,966 – which is more than usable for visual workloads. Other 2-in-1s that we previously tested hit scores a little higher, including the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Gen 10 Aura Edition (30,830) and the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 (33,349).

On the other hand, this machine's battery life puts it in a much better light, having lasted 16hrs and 27mins in our looped video playback test. It's a decent score compared with the average machine featuring the same Intel chipset. It's roughly an hour longer than the Yoga 2-in-1, for instance, and an hour shorter than the OmniBook Ultra Flip 14. In today's market, anything above roughly 14-15 hours can be considered a good battery life, although there are a handful of machines out there capable of beating 20-plus hours.

The SSD speeds are slightly below average at 5,152MB/s and 4,505MB/s for reads and writes – which is much lower than we would normally see in HP machines, which usually score close to 7,000MB/s for reads and more than 5,550MB/s for writes.

HP EliteBook X Flip G1i: Features

We generally enjoyed using the HP EliteBook X Flip G1i's keyboard. The travel distance is a little on the shorter side, but not as short as some of the consumer-grade devices, and there's a huge amount of snappy force feedback with each keystroke. There's also the downside of a higher resistance with such heavy feedback, meaning it becomes harder to get into a proper touch typing flow. That said, it's still eminently enjoyable to use. We appreciated the inclusion of a full-sized Enter key, but were disappointed that the PG UP and PG DN keys were crammed just above the Left and Right arrows. There are no surprises otherwise, with the Function keys giving an array of useful toggles – including F2 to activate the screen guard that dims the display and decimates the viewing angle in such a way that prevents shoulder surfing and ensures privacy on the move. There's also a shortcut with F11 that opens the MyHP control dock. The EliteBook touchpads are perfectly sized, well-positioned in the center of the machine, and look far better than most you'll find in laptops. But they suffer from a glassy surface that's far too slippery and doesn't offer enough friction for more precise cursor movements. Left-clicking and right-clicking, however, is perfect with plenty of travel distance and feedback.

You'll also benefit from a full complement of ports – which is hard to pull off in a 14-inch machine. The ports include HDMI 2.1, two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 and 3.5mm headphone jack on the left-hand side of the chassis, another USB-C port and a USB-A port, in addition to a Nano lock slot and a SIM slot for mobile communications on the right-hand side. Wireless options include Bluetooth 5.4 and Wi-Fi 7 connectivity. Other than a lack of an SD card slot, there's pretty much everything you would need in this impressively compact device.

As with HP's EliteBook family of security-centric laptops, you'll get access to the HP Wolf Security suite alongside a one-year subscription, alongside a plethora of apps like HP Sure Start, Sure Run, Sure Recover, Sure Click, and Sure Admin. Thanks to a 5MP AI infrared camera, you can benefit from facial recognition with Windows Hello, onlooker alerts (notifications that warn you when you're being watched), and presence sensing (meaning the machine can sleep or wake depending on your proximity). There's even a fingerprint scanner built into the power button.

HP also claims that the firmware is protected against quantum computing hacks thanks to the HP Endpoint Security Controller – an isolated, dedicated microprocessor that protects the BIOS. Chances are you aren't going to face those in the wild for a good few years. But it's better to be safe than sorry.

HP EliteBook X Flip G1i: Is it worth it?

You're going to be drawn to a machine like this if you're a professional who needs to work on the move and finds value in the configurable form factor – whether you're presenting, viewing content, using it as a secondary display, or just want the option. Although a little on the weighty side, it's a compact and sufficiently stylish device with an excellent build quality and premium feel. Thankfully, if you're working in sensitive areas in particular, the mobility that this machine encourages is also met with a raft of protective and safeguarding features that tries to give you the freedom and peace of mind to work confidently and capably while on the move, without looking over your shoulder; indeed, there's a feature for that.

The display that we tested (a basic 1,900 x 1,200-pixel panel) punched above its weight, so we'd expect good things if you wanted to upgrade to the higher-quality version. The hardware, however, is a little bit of a letdown. That's common with mobile Lunar Lake processors, but the trade-off is better power efficiency with a battery life that will last a full working day, and then some. Overall, there's nothing particularly standout – but nothing particularly worrisome about this solid and sophisticated enterprise laptop that will put even the most paranoid professional's mind at ease.

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