HP Elite Dragonfly
HP’s new professional ultrabook comes with a novel feature set and a lightweight chassis.
HP has designed plenty of premium work laptops, but the Elite Dragonfly is a little more professional than most. Anyone who has to work on-the-go will appreciate this device’s sub-1kg overall weight and the fact that it comes with a sim-card slot for uninterrupted 4G LTE internet. It’s also got all the security trimmings of a solid professional ultrabook with physical shutter camera, fingerprint sign-in sensor and a privacy screen that can’t be viewed from side angles.
However, the Elite Dragonfly introduces some novel perks including Tile integration that allows you to locate your unit (even when it’s off), AI-based malware detection software that’ll flag suspicious activity from unidentified PC viruses, and an in-built OS recovery software that’ll safeguard you from ransomware attacks.
The honed metal chassis is built from recycled magnesium and the Dragonfly Blue finish with glossy steel trimmings make a stylish and professional looking partnership. Two buckle hinges hold a 13.3-inch Full HD or 4K screen ($100 at some outlets) to the base and allow this convertible to fully fold back on itself. HP includes a stylus that offers enough touch sensitivity to write notes and draw convincingly using an artificial pencil or paintbrush and the backlit membrane keyboard has been designed to be as quiet as possible. The keys themselves offer enough resistance to be comfortable to type on and the trackpad is smooth and nicely sized. The keyboard surround speakers were designed by Bang & Olufsen and are loud enough to work well for both conference calls and media playback.
While all these trimmings are nice attributes, can it handle whatever work you need to do. These days a lot of tasks will be lightweight document processing or browser based, but the Elite Dragonfly can be configured with four variations of 8th Gen Core i5 or Core i7 CPUs to match your workload. We tested a unit running an Intel Core i5-8365U and 16GB of RAM and while these are not the latest generation of laptop CPUs, they actually hold their own against any 10th generation chips. The Elite Dragonfly was less than 10% behind the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 running a Core i5-1035G7 CPU and 8GB of RAM in general work tasks and it was only 14.2% behind the HP Spectre x360 we tested with a Core i7-1065G7 across the same PCMark tests. If we look at raw CPU computing tasks then the Elite Dragonfly’s performance was between 20% and 33% behind these 10th generation chips in Cinebench multi-threaded tests. When it comes to graphically intensive tasks the Elite Dragonfly’s performance lagged even further, with its Intel UHD 620 GPU performing between 15% and 50% behind the new Intel Iris Plus GPUs on laptops running 10th gen chips.
The 36.8Wh battery life was disappointing, lasting 50 minutes less in PCMark 8 Home Battery benchmarks than a HP Spectre x360. The Elite Dragonfly also only managed five hours of movie playback a time, which was just 20 minutes longer than a Spectre x360 with a power hungry 4K screen. Considering you can get a much better specced Spectre x360 with a 4K screen for between $400 and $1,000 less, all the Elite Dragonfly’s premium perks come at a cost. .