HP Elite Dragonfly
A stylish convertible that will fold around into any format – or serve happily as a slim and serious workhorse
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PRICE £1,509 (£1,811 inc VAT) from store.hp.com
HP’s Elite Dragonfly isn’t the smallest or lightest laptop here, but it’s definitely toward that end of the scale. At less than 20cm deep it will nestle into any satchel, and its 1.01kg weight feels almost flyaway compared to the some of the chunkers in this month’s Labs.
Impressively, HP has managed at the same time to engineer in a 360° hinge, permitting you to flip the screen around into stand, tent or tablet formats; there’s even a stylus included, so you can make the most of tablet mode right away. And we’re pleased to see that nothing about the design is compromised to enable that flexibility. The 2-in-1 and inking options are a bonus for when you want them, but for everyday work you can forget about them entirely.
Indeed, we’d say the Dragonfly cuts a more practical figure than some traditional laptops. The build quality can’t be faulted: the lid and body both feel perfectly rigid, while the keyboard is firm and positive and the touchpad is a decent size too, with a pleasing click action. The “iridescent dragonfly blue” finish adds a note of style to what is undeniably a prestige bit of engineering.
Turn to the screen and things become a little more nuanced. The Dragonfly uses a glossy 13.3in panel, and the model we tested has a Full HD resolution, yielding a pixel density of 164ppi. That’s fine for work purposes, but we’d prefer a slightly squarer aspect ratio and a higher resolution for pin-sharp text. You can get the latter by stepping up to the 4K vvaarriiaanntt, but that adds around £200 to the price of what is already an expensive computer.
On the plus side, the standard display performs rather well, with a top brightness of 402cd/m2 and a strong contrast ratio of 1,702:1. And with 98.5% sRGB coverage and an average Delta E of 1.06, colours should look perfect even to a trained eye. The Bang & Olufsen-branded internal speakers perhaps aren’t quite up to cinematic standards, but they’re still warm enough to make films and music enjoyable, and surprisingly loud.
Like a few other laptops this month, the Elite Dragonfly is built on an eighth-generation CPU from 2018, but that’s not necessarily a problem. The Core i7-8565U remains a perfectly capable part, and it’s partnered here with the usual 16GB of RAM and a reasonably nippy Intel SSD. Thus equipped, the Dragonfly achieved an overall score of 80 in our benchmarks, matching many of its tenthgeneration rivals.
The Dragonfly didn’t disgrace itself in our 3D tests either, giving us a playable 43.8fps in the 720p Dirt: Showdown
benchmark and 31.4fps in the off-screen 1080p GFXBench Car Chase test. Clearly you’ll do better with a discrete GPU, but this is as good a performance as you could ask for from the UHD Graphics 620 chip.
More serious pursuits haven’t been forgotten. The small chassis finds space for one USB-A 3.1 port, twin USB-C sockets (one of which is used for charging) and full-sized HDMI. There’s no built in Ethernet, but the internal Intel AX200 card supports Wi-Fi 6 and the 4K model has a SIM slot at the side for LTE connectivity.
We’ve just two hesitations about the HP Elite Dragonfly. First, while we love the lightness of this laptop, some of the weight saving has evidently come from shrinking the power cells. The 38Wh battery gave us less than eight and a half hours of video playback: that’s not terrible, but it slightly undermines its otherwise excellent portability credentials. The battery on the 4K model is 50% larger, but it may not run for much longer due to the increased power demands of the screen.
The other issue is the price. It’s understood that a business laptop worthy of the name may cost more than a typical consumer system. The Dragonfly, however, is one of the most expensive products in this month’s Labs, and you might reasonably question whether it’s worth the premium. If you’re focused on portability, the Dynabook Portégé X30L opposite is cheaper, lighter and faster – or, if you’re seeking a daily workhorse, the heftier Huawei Matebook X Pro overleaf offers a more luxurious screen, plus twice the storage and a bigger battery.
Where the Dragonfly succeeds is in finding a workable sweet spot between the two – and, let’s not forget, adding the versatility of that flexible hinge. If you like your laptops small and swivelly, and don’t mind paying, the HP Elite Dragonfly could be your ideal all-rounder.
“The build quality can’t be faulted: the lid and body both feel perfectly rigid, while the keyboard is firm and positive”