Living With the HP Dragonfly Folio G3

HP's Dragonfly Folio continues to be one of the more unusual—and appealing—notebooks on the market. The vast majority of 2-in-1 or convertible notebooks are either designed so that the screen rotates and flips over so the keyboard is behind it (like HP's EliteBook or Pavilion x360 series) or as tablets with a detachable keyboard (like Microsoft's Surface Pro series). Instead, the Dragonfly Folio is designed so that you can pull the screen forward, changing it from a conventional notebook to one in which the screen is in front of the keys but leaves the trackpad exposed, which is good for watching videos; or pull it all the way forward in which it lies flat on top of the keyboard so it feels like a tablet with a flat back.

I find this design works just as well as other 2-in-1s when used as a standard laptop, and the pullback screen is nice for watching videos. It's still not as light as a standalone tablet, but it's notably better than most convertible laptops when used as a tablet as there are no keys on the back. It's certainly a more interesting alternative to the very nice but more conventional Elite Dragonfly G3.

It's an unusual design that I've liked since the Elite Folio. This year's model, called the Dragonfly Folio G3, ups the ante with a larger trackpad, improved webcam, and new system control software. More obviously, it has been redesigned so that it has fans with vents on the side of the machine to improve the thermals, is more serviceable (no longer requiring special tools), and has a 3:2 aspect ratio for the screen.

Measuring 11.7-by-9.21-by-0.7 inches and weighing 3.1 pounds (3.8 pounds with the included 65-watt charger), the Dragonfly Folio G3 isn't the lightest machine in the category but it remains very easy to carry. The top is a faux leather material, while the bulk of the machine is a dark grey with a magnesium base.

(Credit: HP)

The left side of the unit has a headphone/mic jack, two USB-C/Thunderbolt ports (which are used for charging), and a micro-SIM slot to use with an optional 5G modem. Having only a few ports isn't unusual for small laptops, but I would have liked to have seen a USB-A slot and maybe an HDMI port, or at least USB-C ports on both sides of the laptop. The right side has only a magnetized slot for attaching an included pen. This seemed stronger than many of the magnetic attachments for pens I've seen in the past, though I still found the pen could get dislodged in a bag.

The unit I tested has a 1920-by-1280 LCD touch display rated at 400 nits with low blue light, with the 3:2 ratio I've seen on a few other machines this year. Like pretty much all high-end laptops, the screen looks very good, and the 3:2 ratio provides a bit more screen area, which I like for word processing and web browsing. HP also offers as options its SureView Reflect privacy screen, an etched anti-glare display, and a 3000-by-2000 OLED display, likely the same as the excellent display on the Spectre X360 13.5 I tested earlier this year.

This year's model features an upgraded webcam—an 8-megapixel camera with a 100-degree field of view that I thought looked excellent for a built-in webcam, along with an IR detection system. Using the myHP app, you can control autoframing so that the camera captures the whole field of view, or focuses on the upper body, or head and shoulder (which I prefer for most Zoom calls). It also has various lighting and appearance enhancements, of which only the lighting adjustment is on by default, the way I prefer.

The webcam and IR system allows for a few of what HP calls “Smart Experiences.” These include a privacy alert that can notify you when it detects another person who may be able to view your display, and the option to dim the screen when you aren't looking at it. These are nice privacy enhancements.

A separate app controls “auto lock and awake,” HP's Presence Detection system. This can automatically lock your system when you walk away from it, and automatically wake it up when you approach, using Windows Hello with the camera. I thought this worked very well. The only real drawback to the camera is the lack of a physical shutter, though there is a function key to turn it off.

Compared with most small laptops, the Dragonfly Folio's audio sounds particularly good, with two top- and two bottom-firing speakers, along with two microphones on the top of the display. HP offers what it calls “media mode audio tuning” which it says adjusts the audio settings when the display is pulled forward. It's subtle, but you can hear a bit of a difference.

The version of the Dragonfly Folio I tested had an Intel Core i7-1265U processor (Alder Lake), a 15-watt processor which has two performance cores and eight efficient cores, with a total of 12 threads. It has a base clock of 2.1 GHz, and a maximum boost clock of 4.7 GHz, with Intel's Iris Xe Graphics, along with support for Intel's vPro management.

This was the same processor I saw in the more conventional Elite Dragonfly, and the performance was similar. Compared to other Intel processors in the Alder Lake family, the i7-1265U has fewer performance cores, which hurts it relatively in multi-threaded applications, but it holds its own in lightly threaded applications. As with every machine I've tested lately, it feels quite speedy for things like web browsing or word processing.

For my more demanding tests, there are bigger differences. Converting a large video in Handbrake took 1 hour, 59 minutes on the Dragonfly Folio, comparable to the Elite Dragonfly G3 but slower than most of the enterprise machines I've tested this year. (The fastest laptop with integrated graphics on this test has been the AMD Ryzen 7 Pro-based EliteBook 865 at 1 hour, 16 minutes.) Running a large portfolio simulation in MatLab took 42 minutes, 42 seconds, again among the slowest enterprise machines I've tested this year.

But on a very large spreadsheet model, DragonFly Folio completed the test in 37 minutes, just slightly behind the Elite Dragonfly, which had the fastest times I've seen. This is an area where the Intel machines—particularly those that had few cores running faster—consistently did better, and I continue to speculate it is because Excel doesn't really take advantage of more than a couple of cores. 

Battery life was fine. I got 10 hours and 12 minutes on PC Mark's Modern Office battery test, respectable if not market-leading.

Like the rest of HP's enterprise laptops, the Dragonfly Folio comes with HP's Wolf Security, which includes a self-healing BIOS and a root of trust, and SureClick, a private browser option.

The Dragonfly series is HP's top-end, with prices to match. HP says the unit I tested with a Core i7-1265U processor, 16GB of RAM, 512GB SSD, 1920-by-1280 touch screen, and 5G modem should sell for about $2,474, though as I write this, it seems to be selling for $2,749 on HP's website. A similar version with a Core i7-1255U processor and no modem is at $2,379.

For that, you get an executive notebook with decent performance, a top-notch camera and audio system, and a very unusual design that works well as a standard laptop and even better when used for watching videos or as a tablet.