As much as I love a premium system, in this economy, it’s not an option for many consumers (including me). Plus, not everyone needs a laptop with all the bells and whistles. For this crowd, there’s the HP Envy x360 2-in-1 14-inch laptop. As a convertible laptop, what the Envy sacrifices in performance it makes up in versatility, deftly transforming to accommodate a myriad of use cases. An alluring 2.8K OLED touch display, surprisingly clear speakers, whisper-quiet fans, and nearly 12 hours of battery life are added bonuses that definitely help make up for the Envy x360 not being more of a powerhouse.

Aside from the Envy not being as powerful as a premium system, the only real issues I have with the laptop are a stiff keyboard and HP not bundling the stylus, which tacks an additional $80 onto the price. However, if you’re a student, or a mobile or creative professional who doesn’t want to break the budget, the HP Envy x360 2-in-1 14-inch laptop is one of the best HP laptops you can get this year.

About this review: HP sent us the Envy x360 2-in-1 Laptop 14" for review. It did not have any input on this article's contents.

HP Envy x360 2-in-1 14-inch laptop pricing and availability

The HP Envy x360 2-in-1 14-inch laptop is available at Best Buy and HP.com. My review unit costs $1,149 and has a 2.1-GHz Intel Core Ultra 7 155U processor with 16GB of LPDDR5-6,400 MHz RAM, a 1TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 SSD, integrated Intel Graphics, and a 14-inch, 2.8K (2880 x 1800), OLED touch display with a 120Hz refresh rate with 0.2-millisecond response rate.

You can get your hands on the notebook’s base model for $799. However, with that model you only get an Intel Core Ultra 5 125U CPU, a 512GB PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 SSD, integrated Intel Graphics, and a 14-inch, 1920 x 1200 IPS touch display.

Design and ports

Unassuming versatility

The Envy x360 will never be accused of being flashy. But for the price, you won’t find me complaining. Most of the laptop’s chassis is made of Meteor Silver aluminum. The lid is embellished with a pair of long and short glossy metal pieces that create the HP logo. The right hinge has the word Envy engraved, which is a nice touch.

Opening the laptop, you get more of that gray aluminum. The touchpad sits in the middle of the palm rest, which, according to HP, is 19% larger than last year’s model. The full-sized keyboard sits in a recess above the touchpad, and is slightly darker gray than the rest of the machine. Flip the laptop on its lid and you’ll see three dark gray rubber feet (two short, one long) and a large vent grille along the long back foot with two speaker grilles towards the front of the system with one positioned at each short foot.

The Envy doesn’t have many ports, but I was pleasantly surprised by what it has. The laptop sports two full USB-A ports along with a full HDMI 2.1 port. You also get a USB-C port as well as a Thunderbolt 4 port and a headset jack.

Now for the fun part. The Envy x360 is a convertible laptop. As such, that means you can bend it into different use cases, which ramps up the versatility far beyond what you can get from your traditional clamshell. You can lay it flat to collaborate with others, turn it into a tent to enjoy it in entertainment mode, or fold the lid onto its back for tablet mode. I wish the keys would retract into the keyboard deck like some of the old Lenovo Yoga laptops from back in the day, as the keys can be a distraction. The hinges are sturdy, but still allowed me to quickly transform the Envy as I saw fit.

At 3.1 pounds, 12.3 x 8.6 x 0.67 inches, I slid the Envy into my Telfar bag and kept it moving to my friend’s house. That’s a little lighter than the HP Spectre x360 14 (3.2 pounds, 12.4 x 8.7 x 0.67 inches), the Envy’s more premium cousin. The Lenovo Yoga 7 (12.5 x 8.8 x 0.7 inches) is the heavyweight here at 3.6 pounds.

Display, webcam, and audio

Pretty display with surprisingly clean audio

A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but one viewed on an OLED panel must be worth so much more. When I wasn’t staring at black text on a white background while writing the review on the 14-inch, 2.8K OLED touchscreen, I enjoyed getting caught up on “Shogun.” When I wasn’t cursing out Buntaro for his obsessive, abusive behavior toward Mariko, I was caught up in the intricacies of the patterns in actor Hiroyuki Sanada MBE’s outfit. The detail on the Envy’s screen was so clear that I easily made out the golden flower patterns that melded in with the white filigree along the shoulder pads.

Although I wouldn’t recommend doing any heavy photo or video editing on the Envy, if you are so inclined, you’ll be happy to know the screen is pretty color accurate. My colorimeter got a color gamut reading of 100% for the sRGB and DCI-P3 scales. The AdobeRGB and NTSC came in at 97 and 95%, respectively. It’s enough to potentially land the Envy on the best OLED laptops list.

The touch panel is seamlessly accurate, keeping up with my frantic fingers' engagement with the screen. It makes for a great tablet in a pinch. However, I really wish HP thought to bundle its HP Rechargeable MPP 2.0 Tilt Pen with the Envy instead of charging consumers an extra $80 for the privilege. I hate having to get fingerprints on such a pretty display, but I had to, which is a shame.

HP rates the touchscreen at 500 nits. I measured the four corners and the center of the screen with a white background at max brightness and got a measurement of 495 nits. It’s not bright enough to use in direct sunlight, but fine for just about any other environment.

My one complaint is that the top and bottom bezels could be thinner. It’s minor, but when it comes to displays, particularly OLED and mini-LEDs, I want as much real estate as possible. If there’s any consolation to the thicker top bezel, it's that there’s room for a physical webcam shutter. Yes, the digital ones are cool, but I just feel better having a switch that I can physically push and pull to ensure there are no creepers spying on me through the webcam.

Speaking of the webcam, the Envy’s 5MP camera does a great job of capturing color. As the test shot shows, my skin looks resplendent, and the camera got the exact shade of purple, blue, and green in my locs. The details, however, were a bit fuzzy as my forehead looked like I had a smoothing filter turned on.

Again with the bottom-mounted speakers here. Although as much as I usually hate them, I have to admit that the Envy’s Poly Studio-tuned speakers sound pretty good. They’re not the loudest by any means, but no matter what I was listening to, they delivered clear highs and mids. You can hear the lows, but they aren’t as pronounced as I like. Still, you’re definitely going to want to invest in a pair of headphones, especially since the preinstalled DTS Sound Unbound software only offers enhancements for a pair of cans or home theater.

The laptop speakers sound their best in tent and tablet modes, where the speakers are relatively free of obstruction.

Keyboard and touchpad

Stiffer than expected

The Envy x360’s chiclet-keyboard features large keycaps with generous spacing, big, easy-to-read lettering, and bright backlighting. It even has a Microsoft Copilot button, so you know there’s a NPU on board. And while I had an okay time typing on the keyboard, I found that the keys were a bit on the stiff side. It took a while to get used to, but I didn’t notice it after a while.

The touchpad offered great palm rejection and performed three-finger flicks and two-finger scrolls with ease. The bottom corners of the mouse depress with a nice, noisy click.

Performance

The Envy x360 is one of the first laptops I've reviewed this year that has one of Intel’s 14th Gen U-series chips. Just like its predecessors, the U in the 28-watt Intel Core Ultra 7 155U CPU’s (12 cores, 16 threads) name lets you know that it's built to focus on power-efficiency rather than performance. That means better battery life, sometimes at the expense of seeing higher numbers on benchmarks. However, being that the Envy is targeting students, mobile, and creative professionals, you’re going to get mid-level performance, which should be more than enough to bang out a paper, report, or do some light video edits.

I put the Envy through my normal workflow, which is usually 50 open tabs in Google Chrome (don’t judge me) with a mix of G-Suite apps, tech and business sites, social media, YouTube and email with Slack, Discord, and Notepad running in the background. The laptop survived relatively unscathed until I started editing video with DaVinci Resolve, which introduced some slowdown into the mix.

While the Envy has a lot of giddy-up during real-world usage, the synthetic benchmarks show that there’s a world of difference between Intel H and U Series. For instance, the Envy x360 couldn’t hold a candle to competing systems on Geekbench 6 (single and multi-core), even the Lenovo Yoga 7 with its AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS CPU. The trend continued throughout the rest of the benchmarking, including Cinebench 2024, Crossmark, and PCMark 10.

Although the Envy x360 only has integrated Intel Graphics, the laptop can still play some games. I got an average 60 frames per second at native resolution on Hades II. Games like Cyberpunk 2077, on the other hand, are out of the Envy’s league. If you want to do some gaming, I’d suggest sticking to older titles or indies.

Something to keep in mind is that whether you’re working on a document, watching a movie, doing some light gaming, or content creation-focused editing, the Envy x360’s fans stay whisper quiet, even on the Best Performance setting.

Where the Envy x360 really shines is the battery life, lasting 11 hours and 24 minutes on the PCMark 10 Modern Office Battery Test. Before I started the test, I made sure to set the notebook’s power configuration to Best Performance with brightness at 200 nits.

Should you buy the HP Envy x360 2-in-1 Laptop 14?

You should buy the HP Envy x360 2-in-1 Laptop 14 if:

• You want a lightweight, convertible, portable laptop
• You want a laptop that can last longer than an average workday
• You want a quiet laptop no matter what the occasion
• You want a colorful, accurate touch display

You shouldn’t buy the HP Envy x360 2-in-1 Laptop 14 if:

• You want a more powerful laptop
• You want a better keyboard

HP is casting a wide net with the Envy x360 2-in-1 14-inch laptop. According to the company, this laptop is made for people who work on the go as well as college students and content creators. Due to the sheer versatility a 2-in-1 laptop brings, the Envy can successfully capture almost everyone it’s trying to snag. The notebook easily transforms beyond the traditional clam-shell form, opening up more usability to a variety of users. It’s lightweight, making it easy to travel with, and it has a pretty OLED display that’s equal parts colorful and accurate. Plus, it lasts nearly twelve hours on a charge which lets you burn more than a little midnight oil.

However, the Intel U-Series processor means that the Envy x360 isn’t the most powerful system on the block. That means that people looking to engage in heavy productivity, or serious video and photo editing will have to kick in some more money for a more powerful system. And while it’s a minor complaint, it’s annoying that HP doesn’t include the HP Rechargeable MPP 2.0 Tilt Pen, charging consumers another $80 to get one. But for those looking for a convertible laptop that can work well on the go, the HP Envy x360 2-in-1 laptop is easily one of the best 14-inch laptops available.