HP Envy x360 13.3 (2022) Review

We haven't reviewed a 13.3-inch convertible laptop in a while—most of the models we've seen lately have 14-inch screens—but the HP Envy x360 13.3 (starts at $899; $1,369 as tested) has nothing to apologize for in the display department. While base models have a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel IPS touch screen, our review unit has a gorgeous 2,880-by-1,800 OLED panel. It's also lighter and has longer battery life than most consumer convertibles. Here we will stress the price is $1,369.99 as tested, because our review unit is custom-configured with Windows 11 Pro—the same hardware with Win 11 Home (model 13-bf0797nr) is a more tempting $1,199, on sale for $899 as of this writing. That's a stunning deal that would change this 4-star product to a 5-star Editors' Choice winner if it were a permanent price.

HP Says ‘Have It Your Way' With the Envy x360

Along with the 1,920-by-1,200-pixel, 16:10 aspect ratio screen, the $899 starter Envy x360—actually on sale for $699 at the time of publishing—has an Intel Core i5-1230U processor, 8GB of memory, and a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive. A sharper 2,560-by-1,600-pixel IPS display is a small $30 upgrade.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Our top-of-the-line test unit has not only the OLED touch screen but a Core i7-1250U (two Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 12 threads) CPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. Wi-Fi 6E, a deluxe 5-megapixel webcam, and a rechargeable stylus come standard.

Available in Natural Silver or Space Blue, the Envy x360 is crafted from partly recycled aluminum and measures 0.63 by 11.8 by 8.5 inches (HWD), making it a tad trimmer than the likes of the Dell Inspiron 14 2-in-1 (0.62 by 12.4 by 9 inches) as well as lighter (2.95 versus 3.46 pounds). The side screen bezels are thin—HP claims an 87% screen-to-body ratio. There's no fingerprint reader, but the webcam provides face recognition for Windows Hello logins.

Like a number of ultraportables, the Envy x360 13.3 doesn't make it easy to connect an external monitor—you'll need a DisplayPort adapter for one of the two USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports on its right side, since there is no HDMI port. (The AC adapter also has a USB-C connector.)

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

On the positive side, the convertible doesn't snub USB Type-A peripherals—there's a dropdown USB-A 3.1 port on each side, along with an audio jack and a microSD card slot at left.

Take Your Best Shot 

The Envy's webcam doesn't have a sliding privacy shutter but rather a top-row key that toggles it on and off. It sails past lowball 720p resolution with a choice of 2,560-by-1,440 (16:9), 2,560-by-1,706 (3:2), or 2,560-by-1,920 (4:3) stills, as well as 1080p video recording; images are crisp and well-lit with vivid color and no static to speak of.

A GlamCam tab in the HP Command Center utility offers lighting correction and appearance enhancement as well as an auto-frame function that lets you move around the room a little during video calls, like Apple's Center Stage for iPads. An HP Enhanced Lighting app mimics a ring light, too.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Other top-row keys include a program launcher and an emoji key with an encyclopedic pop-up menu of smileys, symbols, and GIFs, as well as brightness and volume controls. The keyboard commits the usual HP sin of half-height, hard-to-hit up and down arrow keys stacked between the left and right arrows in an awkward row instead of inverted T. This is made worse by pairing the arrow keys with the Fn key for Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down.

The keyboard is brightly backlit and has a shallow but snappy typing feel with comfortable feedback. A good-sized, buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly and takes a bit of pressure for a quiet click.

A Dazzling OLED Display With Still-Sharp LCD Options

You know that OLED screens offer rich colors and colossal contrast with supremely dark blacks. The Envy's is no exception, with deep, saturated hues and pristine white backgrounds. Viewing angles are broad and fine details look sharp, with no pixelation around the edges of letters.

The screen's brightness is ample but, as with other OLED rather than IPS panels, it's not necessarily impressive when measured in nits (candelas per square meter) by our test equipment.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Luckily, the sky-high contrast makes up for that. Like some other OLED laptops we've tested, the Envy defaults to a dark color palette and offers a focus utility that slightly dims inactive app windows to help extend screen life.

The Bang & Olufsen-tuned speakers aren't particularly loud even at max volume, but they're not harsh or tinny. Sound is perhaps a bit hollow but quite clear, and it's easy to make out overlapping tracks. There's not much bass but supplied software offers music, movie, and voice presets and an equalizer, as well as AI noise cancellation for conferences.

An Included Stylus (and Included Software)

The 6-inch, comfortably thick stylus pen has two small, stiff buttons and a sliding-door USB-C port for recharging. It clings magnetically to the side of the laptop and kept up with my fastest swoops and scribbles, with good palm rejection.

Best of all, it's included in the box. The same can't be said for more premium 2-in-1 laptops and tablets.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

As for the included software, the HP Command Center utility includes a number of tools and apps. An HP Display Control menu lets you switch among default, sRGB, Adobe RGB, DCI-P3, and automated color modes or temperatures for the display.

Additional preinstalled software includes Dropbox, Adobe, and ExpressVPN trials, an HP Palette app for managing digital photos, HP Quick Drop for swapping files with your smartphone, and the Concepts sketching app. The standard warranty is one year; three years of pickup and return support with accidental damage protection costs $159.

Testing the HP Envy x360: Affordable Convertibles Clash 

For our benchmark charts, we compared the Envy x360 13.3 with four other 2-in-1s. Three have 14-inch displays—the under-$1,000 Lenovo Yoga 7i 14 Gen 7, the Dell Inspiron 14 2-in-1, and the slightly more costly Acer Spin 5. The last spot goes to an upscale 13.5-inch convertible with a 3:2 aspect ratio OLED screen—HP's flagship Spectre x360 13.5, about $1,750 as tested. You can see their as-reviewed setups in the table below:

Productivity Tests 

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. 

Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Envy x360 lands in the back half of the pack but did perfectly well, easily clearing the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate great productivity for workday apps, like Word and Excel, and cruising through the Photoshop exercise.

Intel's low-wattage CPU, of course, doesn't challenge its own stronger P-series chip found in the Acer. Regardless, this laptop is fine for any kind of work short of CGI rendering or 4K video editing.

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines, like texturing, and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The Envy and Inspiron bring up the rear, but none of these laptops' integrated graphics can compete with the dedicated GPUs of gaming laptops and workstations.

Clearly, this laptop is strictly for casual gaming or video streaming—not esports or world-spanning adventure games—and, again, not intended for 3D media work. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits.

All five convertibles deliver impressive battery life, but the Envy comes out on top with a runtime of almost 17 hours in our video playback marathon. It and the Spectre dominate in display color coverage, as you'd expect from their OLED screens, though all except possibly the Dell are adequate for everyday work, and the Envy x360 shows ample brightness.

Verdict: A Deal Worth Grabbing

We assume HP.com's $899 sale for the Windows 11 Home equivalent of our test system won't last for more than a few days after this review appears, but at that price it's a steal. A capable, lightweight convertible with a spiffy OLED screen for under $1,000 is a bargain too good to pass by. That said, it's a deal that's bound to be seen again before the end of the year, likely during the Black Friday rush.

Even judging this Envy x360 13.3 configuration by its regular price of $1,199, it almost unseats the Yoga 7i 14 Gen 7 as our Editors' Choice among affordable 2-in-1 laptops. With that in mind, the HP Envy x360 is a great alternative if you feel like treating yourself to an OLED instead of an IPS display. Kudos to HP for producing such a deal of a system.