Intro
There’s an ultrabook category carved out by the iconic Apple MacBook Air and more recently from the likes of the brilliant Dell XPS 13. Laptops that have ultra thin bezels, lightweight, slim, look good and have a fantastic battery life. HP has added to this mix with the 13.3 inch Elite Dragonfly, a business/consumer crossover ultraportable. Can it compete with the established competition? Let’s find out.
Design
When you take the Elite Dragonfly out of the box, adjectives like stunning, incredible and exquisite come to one’s head. The Iridescent dragonfly blue colour surrounding the CNC magnesium chassis is striking. This follows through around the keyboard deck and top firing speakers.
It tips the scales at 0.99kg or 2.2lbs but feels amazingly solid thanks to the magnesium alloy. There’s very little flex on the Dragonfly so it’s no surprise it is certified to MIL-STD-810G military standard.
The sturdy 360-degree hinge gives the Dragonfly four versatile modes depending on your usage. The traditional laptop mode, tablet mode to use with the Active Pen, Tent mode for presentations and Media mode for catching up on your favourite movies.
The HP engineers have made it easy to open up the Dragonfly, five screws and the bottom plate easily opens up. The beefy battery is removable along with the M.2 SSD slot that supports super-fast PCIe x4 NVMe drives. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the memory that is soldered on, so make sure you buy the maximum 16GB model if you intend to fully utilise this.
Display
This review model has a 13.3” Full HD IPS panel. The display is bright, vivid and sharp with narrow bezels surrounding it. If you happen to be sitting in a crowded train or plane, it’s nice to be able to block nosy seatmates from seeing your screen with the push of a button, thanks to the HP Sure View integrated privacy screen.
Brightness is rated at 1000 nits. Plenty for outdoor viewing and ensures the screen looks fantastic with Sure View Gen3 integration. In previous Sure View generations, the display looked dull and washed out, no such problem with the Gen3 version.
The Dragonfly has a colour gamut of 72% NTSC, fine for office, photo editing and content creation work.
Since this is an IPS display, the viewing-angle stability is very good. Gorilla Glass 5 protects the touchscreen however, the glossy panel does naturally bounce sunlight and office lighting off it that can be distracting at times.
Pen
The HP Active Pen G3 included with this review model is rechargeable (via USB-C). It connects via Bluetooth with 4,096 pressure levels and customisable button functions. This 15g stylus is quite chunky but feels comfortable in the hand. The pen worked perfectly with note-taking or a spot of illustration in one of the 360 modes. However, there’s no home for the pen on the laptop.
Connectivity
On the right side, you have one USB 3.1 Gen 1 (charging), the power button, Kensington lock and the Nano SIM slot for 4G LTE.
On the left, you have one HDMI 1.4, a headphone microphone combo and two Thunderbolt 3, USB Type-C™ connectors with power delivery 3.0 support.
HP has integrated an Intel® AX200 Wi-Fi 6 (2×2) and Bluetooth® 5 Combo card which gives excellent wifi coverage even from a distance away.
The 4G LTE is handy if you find yourself away from a WiFi access point or an area with fast 4G speeds to take advantage of.
Keyboard & Touchpad
HP has put a lot of effort into the Elite Dragonfly’s keyboard, each key is CNC-engineered on its spill-resistant, backlit premium collaboration keyboard. It has good, firm action and importantly for some, is quiet when typing. Overall a great typing experience.
The large glass multi-touch gesture touchpad beneath the keyboard works smoothly, and there’s a tactile action on the integrated mouse buttons. It uses Microsoft’s Precision drivers, so it has excellent tracking for two-finger scrolling and other multi-finger gestures as well as excellent palm rejection.
Audio & Webcam
The Bang & Olufsen, four premium stereo speakers are made from 5% ocean-based recycled plastic. A small but significant step in the right direction. The audio is loud and clear for both conference calls and media consumption usage.
The Dragonfly’s multi-array microphones also work well for video or conference calling. The 720p HD webcam is typically average, good if the surrounding lighting is OK. The webcam also has a built-in privacy shutter, so you don’t need to stick on a smiley face sticker on it.
Performance
Inside this review model is an 8th Gen i7-8565U Whiskey Lake processor, 16 GB DDR3 memory soldered onboard, 512 GB PCIe® NVMe™ SSD with 32 GB PCIe® NVMe™ Intel® Optane™ Memory for storage acceleration.
For typical office workloads, the Dragonfly had no performance issues. Multiple Edge tabs, Word or Excel spreadsheets, email and social media apps. Even a spot of Adobe and Photoshop and basic Premiere Pro video editing is usable on the Dragonfly.
The fans do come on very occasionally depending on the workload but not loud enough to be annoying. When taxed, the Dragonfly gets a little warm underneath but nothing to worry about when working on your lap.
Graphics
The Intel UHD Graphics 620 will only play low to medium setting games from its integrated graphics. Playing the odd Rocket League or even Fortnite on low/medium settings after work is possible.
Battery Life
The Dragonfly has a 4-cell, 56 Wh Li-ion battery. Battery life is around 8 to 9 hours general office use. HP says the SureView screen gets roughly 22 percent worse battery life than the 1W panel model that averages 13 hours.
If you are in a rush, the Dragonfly has HP fast charging from the 65 W USB Type-C™ adapter. Zero to 50% in 30 minutes.
Security
As the Dragonfly is business oriented, HP have pre-installed their usual excellent array of security tools. The Dragonfly comes with a fingerprint sensor and Windows Hello biometric login methods.
HP’s Sure Sense technology is designed to intelligently detect so-called “zero-hour” malware threats that have yet to be identified. Sure Click, sandboxes webpages and read-only Office and PDF attachments; Sure Start, helps the BIOS recover from attacks; and Sure Run, which is designed to prevent any tampering with your security settings.
HP SureView Gen 3 gives a privacy display option useful when you are working close to other people like on a crowded train or aeroplane.
3 Pros and Cons before buying the HP Elite Dragonfly
Exquisite Design – From the lovely matt dragonfly blue to the 1 kilogram lightweight chassis, the Elite Dragonfly is a premium laptop you can proudly take out of your Louis Vitton travel bag.
Good Port Selection For Size – Compared to some ultra thin laptops, where you need to carry multiple dongles and travel adapters with you, the Dragonfly has a generous number of ports for its miniature dimensions.
Flexible 360 Touchscreen – The solid 360 hinges allow you to select your perfect mode to suit your workflow. Fold the Dragonfly to tablet mode to take notes with the active pen for example or tent mode to share your latest PowerPoint with a client.
No 5G Card – The Dragonfly has a Gigabit 4G LTE card built in but could HP used a 5G card instead to future proof it? Probably why HP have quickly announced the Dragonfly G2 with 5G option.
Older 8th Gen CPUs – The Dragonfly doesn’t have the latest 10th Gen Intel chips (HP says it chose the 8th Gen because the new chips don’t support Intel’s vPro features for commercial deployments) Haven’t said that general performance is not noticeable between the 8th and 10th Gen CPU’s.
No dedicated GPU option – Would have been nice of HP to give the option of a dedicated graphics for users with slightly heavier workflow requirements. Like the entry level NVIDIA GeForce MX250 or the newer MX330. The 10th Gen CPU’s will have better integrated graphics on the G2 models when they are released.
Competition
The HP Elite Dragonfly is in a niche category of laptops under 1 kilogram. The nearest competitors are the following in no particular order.
LG Gram 14 Ultra 999g
Apple MacBook Air 1.25kg
Dell XPS 13 (2020) 1.20kg
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 7th Gen 1.09kg
HUAWEI MateBook X Pro 1.33kg
Let me know your thoughts on the competition in the comments below.
Summary
The HP engineers have created the extremely beautiful Dragonfly to prove that corporate laptops don’t have to look boring and bland. It’s extremely well made and stands out from the crowd without looking too out there, aka Razer.
The SureView Gen3 along with 1000 nits brightness has ironed out previous issues with using this privacy display technology, however if you don’t need SureView, go for the low power 400 nits display or the 4K HDR 550 nits panel instead. The x360 modes and active pen give you flexibility to adapt to your workflow needs. Battery life is decent and performance is more than enough for most productivity tasks thrown at it.
Yes, you pay a premium for the Elite Dragonfly and it’s not going to be deployed throughout an organisation, however the Dragonfly is an excellent productivity business laptop. The one grey cloud from recommending this at the time of this review is the successor, Elite Dragonfly G2 will be launching in mid-2020. Should one wait?
What do you guys think? Leave your comments and discuss below.
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