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High-end laptops have their work cut out for them. Not only do they have to look a class apart, but they have to deliver high-end specs packed in a (hopefully) sleek, compact body as well. Beauty and brains, as they say. While HP has been consistently delivering good workhorses for the common consumer, the latest from its stable is the super-premium HP Dragonfly G4. Pitched as a business laptop, I’ve found this to be a great laptop for just about anybody who has the moolah for it. Read on to find out why.
Display
A classy, minimalist logo adorns the laptop lid as I slide it out of my bag. Weighing just under 1 kg, this laptop makes commuting with a device so much easier for my elderly millennial shoulders. The HP Dragonfly G4 sports a 13.5-inch touchscreen display with a fairly unique 3:2 aspect ratio. This is great news if your work — like mine — involves a lot of reading, editing and writing. Or even analysing a ton of documents and Excel sheets, day in, day out. The touchscreen display is smooth, with a faint trail tracing the swipe of my fingers across the screen. Despite using the touchscreen quite often for navigation, I noticed a surprisingly lack of fingerprints on the display. The body of the laptop however really holds on to my traces.
Productivity
Using the HP Dragonfly G4 for a bunch of online briefings and meetings turned out to be a great decision! I’ve never looked nicer on a 5-MP webcam! There’s a “natural tone” kicking in at the software level, but there’s no whitewashing of my complexion. The webcam also balances the multiple light sources in the room really well, never over-exposing the frame.
HP also claims that this is the “first business notebook to support simultaneous use of two cameras”—meaning users can set up a separate webcam and use it in addition to the on-device webcam and have it focus on you (the presenter) as well as the presentation (could be a physical product too!). An auto-camera select function also uses face tracking to automatically switch between two cameras based on which camera you are facing at a given moment. There are usual features like background blur and ‘be right back’ that lets you notify other participants when you need to step away for a bit.
There’s a quad stereo speaker setup by the premium Bang & Olufsen, which is bound to deliver! The sound comes through really well-balanced and no distortion was there even at really high volumes. The chiclet-type keyboard is premium too. It’s spill resistant and offers two levels of backlight intensity. Key travel is satisfying and typing accurate owing to a spacious enough layout despite the compact size. There’s a button-free seamless touchpad which is great to glide across, except for the couple of times where it’s a little extra sensitive and minimises my browser window (typically done by a three-finger swipe) when all I was doing at that moment was scrolling down a webpage (two-finger swipe).
Tech Specs
The HP Dragonfly G4 has a 13th Gen Intel Core U-series processor under the hood with Intel Iris Xe (integrated). It comes with a pre-installed Windows 11 Pro with 16 GB RAM and 512 GB storage. In terms of performance, there’s no slowing down or stuttering at all. Connectivity-wise, the HP Dragonfly G4 has almost all the bases covered. On the left, there’s a HDMI 2.1, a nano-SIM card reader and a USB Type-C Thunderbolt 4 port which I use as the charging port. On the right side, there’s a 3.5 mm jack, USB-A, another Thunderbolt port as well as a nano-lock slot.
The device is powered by a 68 Wh battery which goes on for almost an entire workday. With loads of web browsing, some media playback and an hour of Zoom meetings, the laptop would stay on for anywhere between 6-8 hours on a single charge. There’s a 65 W USB Type-C adapter which takes a little more than an hour to fully charge the laptop.
Verdict
The HP Dragonfly G4 perches at the top rung when it comes to ultra-portable premium laptops. During almost two weeks of usage, I was hard-pressed to find fault with it. One glaring roadblock is the price — which can be prohibitively expensive. However, if premium pricing isn’t a problem, the sleek form factor, great display, excellent battery life and a stunning webcam should be enough to convince you to go for it.
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