HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14: Lovely Hardware, Buggy Software (and Experience)

I've got my HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 for about a week. I really wanted to love the laptop. The hardware ticked all the boxes for me. But the software, or I should say everything built on top of the hardware that forms the actual user experience, is so flaky it's become frustrating. I keep getting bothered by the small problems. They interrupted my work and life and wasted my time. I believe both HP and Microsoft have responsibility for this. The experience of Windows has been going downhill over these years. But what I'm complaining about here is excluding the bad and unreasonable designs of Windows. I'm just talking about PROBLEMS.

Things I like about the hardware:

  1. The haptic trackpad is amazing. Clicky and responsive. I did not experience palm rejection issue.

  2. Great display. I haven't used a 120Hz or OLED computer display before. They do make a difference.

  3. 2-in-1 flippable display with a pen that can be magnetically attached both to the side and on the top.

  4. Windows Hello with both the camera and fingerprint options.

I'm not aware of a second laptop option with 2-in-1 + latest x86 (Intel Core Ultra Series 2 / AMD Ryzen AI 300) + haptic touchpad. That's why I really want it to work.

Things that are okay about the hardware:

  1. I thought the Inter Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) processors were extremely efficient, and it was the main reason I chose to upgrade my laptop this year. Turns out the laptop battery life is just meh. See my other post about the battery life.

  2. Three USB-C ports are not bad, though not the most convenient. An HDMI port would be great. Also, two of the ports are on the gem-cuts on the back corners, pointing 45 degrees out. I thought they would be convenient, but they turned out to be less handy to plug in and out than ones on the side, and they took space both to the side and to the back.

  3. The keyboard is large, clicky, but shallow. Maybe similar to the Macbook ones.

Buggy experience:

  1. USB-C monitor cannot be recognized from time to time. I've used that monitor on other Windows laptops for years and that was never a problem. The Omnibook can connect to it eventually if you unplug and replug and try multiple times or reboot the computer, but the experience is annoying.

Similarly, when I plug in my USB-C charger or monitors that support 65W charging, sometimes it will pop up a notification saying that the power is not enough and will charge slowly, and a triangle with a "!" sign shows on the battery icon, but it may disappear if I replug it, and the charging will work fine.

USB-C monitor cannot be recognized sometimes.

  1. Bluetooth device randomly disconnects. I'm using a Logitech Bluetooth mouse. Yesterday, it suddenly disconnected. I thought it was out of battery, but it turned out to be the laptop Bluetooth suddenly went down. It automatically recovered after about 3 minutes. You can see the Bluetooth button was greyed out, meaning that I did not turn it off. It was down by itself.

The bluetooth is greyed out.

  1. Power-off issue. It happened to me twice that the laptop could not be powered off properly. It seemed to be stuck at the last step. The screen was already off, but the power indication light and the fan were still on. I didn't notice it the first time, and it drained the battery from 100% to 3% overnight. The second time, I took a video. I had to long-press the power button to force it to power off.

The laptop could not power off.

  1. Sleeping issue. I turned off the presence sensing option "turn off my screen when I leave" because I found it too sensitive, aggressively turning off my screen. But then it cannot correctly sleep, either with the external monitor plugged or not. Instead, the screen will blink (go black and recover quickly) every 5 minutes (my sleep time-out). The problem still happens 100% of the time for me and cannot be fixed with a reboot.

The laptop blinks when it tries to sleep.

  1. External display did not light up when the laptop woke up. It does not happen 100% of the time, but when it happens, I have to unplug and replug the usb-c cable to get the external display back on. I do not have a video for this.

I'll probably do a clean reinstallation of Windows 11 and see if things work better and if the battery life would improve. Otherwise, I may send it back.

Asus Zenbook S 14 has gotten a pretty good reputation. Might worth trying? There are good options in Snapdragon ARM laptops, but I don't want to be frustrated with small bugs like this one. Honestly, I would pick up a Macbook if I didn't need a 2-in-1. Now I can see why people move to Apple. It's just a peace of mind.