HP Elite Dragonfly
A dream come true for the traveling professional.
Most of the time, when a business
laptop like the HP Elite Dragonfly
crosses our desk, we kind of roll
our eyes and get on with testing it.
Laptops for professionals never
tend to be too terribly exciting or
much to look at, after all, as they’re
designed to get a job done rather
than be shiny consumer products.
But what if there was a laptop that
could do both?
Well, there finally is. The HP
Elite Dragonfly is packed not only
with the security and IT features
that businesses demand, but it also
includes speedy hardware, plenty
of ports, and most importantly: an
aesthetic to die for. The HP Elite
Dragonfly is, without a doubt, one
of the most beautiful 2-in-
laptops we’ve tested in a long time,
and it’s so thin and light that we
took an entire month to review it
- just so we had an excuse to travel
with it over the holidays and
through CES 2020. Now, you
should keep in mind that the HP
Elite Dragonfly definitely isn’t
cheap. This thing will run you
$2,770 just to get you on the
ground floor. The fact that this
laptop is targeted almost
exclusively to traveling
professionals makes this price
point make a little more sense, but
this is definitely a laptop that has
major crossover appeal.
What makes this laptop
indispensible for the traveling
professional, though, is the LTE
integration. Some driver issues
stopped us from having a totally
seamless experience with having
an “online anywhere” experience,
but for the most part it’s become a
feature that we’re having trouble
imagining life without.
Design
If the HP Elite Dragonfly didn’t
have the word “Elitebook” printed
below the keyboard, there’s no way
It’s thin, light, powerful and is one
of the most stylish laptops on the
market. If you have the cash, you
can’t go wrong with this laptop.
Bill ThomasFrom $2,770, www2.hp.com
we’d know it’s a laptop aimed at
professionals. Simply put, this
laptop is absolutely stunning. It
comes in a gorgeous Iridescent
Dragonfly Blue color option that
simply stands out wherever you
plop it down.
Thanks to the magnesium
chassis, it’s extremely light, too.
The Dragonfly comes in at just
0.99kg to start, though it will be a
bit heavier if you go for the optional
larger battery. The laptop has a
small footprint, too, measuring just
11.98 inches wide and 0.63 inches
thick. HP managed to do this by
making a display with obnoxiously
thin bezels, resulting in an 86%
screen to body ratio. We’ve
definitely seen thinner bezels out
there, but this is a 2-in-1 laptop, so
we’re suitably impressed.
As a bonus, an oleophobic
coating keeps the laptop looking
fresh no matter how many
fingerprints or stains make their
way onto the chassis. Trust us, we
put this laptop through its paces,
traveling from New York to
Colorado, back to New York, then
to CES 2020 and on back to the big
city again. Our review unit has
definitely seen its fair share of dirt,
and it still looks amazing.Performance
Because the HP Elite Dragonfly is
only packed with 8th-Generation
Whiskey Lake processors with
vPro, it’s not the fastest Ultrabook
out there. But it’s not exactly far
behind, either.
We could go on at length about
the lack of serious improvement
generation-on-generation with
Intel’s processors, but the fact is
that this laptop is more than fast
enough for everything you’d
reasonably throw at it.
Our benchmarks totally reflect
this, too. In Cinebench R20, the
Dragonfly was able to get arespectable 1,059 points, which is
great for such a portable device.
What’s more impressive is that in
the Geekbench4 single-core test,
the Dragonfly actually out-
performs a lot of gaming laptops. It
scored 5,266 points in this test,
compared to the Alienware M15’s
4,995. That’s not a giant difference,
of course, but we’re still impressed
that the HP Elite Dragonfly is able
to keep up in this way. Because the
HP Elite Dragonfly is a professional
device meant to play nice with IT
departments, this is a very secure
laptop. The boot sector is protected
by HP Sure Start, which means even
if the computer gets compromised,
you’ll always be able to recover it -
something that’s definitely not a
given these days.Batterylife
Where this laptop particularly
impresses us is in its battery life.
Now, we lived with this device
longer than we typically do with a
laptop, but we never really have to
worry about this laptop not lasting
through whatever project we’re
working on.
Any laptop that we’re able to take
to the CES show floor with half
battery and have it survive
throughout the day deserves
bragging rights. Taking it out of our
backpack again and again, jotting
down notes, banging out quick
articles in the press room and even
taking notes using the touchscreen.
This isn’t necessarily reflected
in our battery benchmarks,
however. In the TechRadar battery
test, where we loop 1080p video
until the laptop dies, the Elite
Dragonfly lasts 8 hours and 11
minutes. But in the PCMark
Home battery test, it only lasts 4
hours and 42 minutes.
Anecdotally, however, we
experienced the laptop lasting
much longer than either of these
tests let on.Business skills,
but with
supermodel
looks.