The HP Elite Dragonfly, Project Athena has landed, and she’s a beauty.
Who says there can’t be any fun to be had in September? HP were kind enough to invite me to their launch event at their offices in Dublin, and I must say, out of all the impressive tech they had on display, this little beauty caught my eye over all else.
With a sub kilo weight, made out of a hard wearing CNC machined Magesium coated in a goregous yet understated Dragonfly Blue finish, HP truly has brought their A game to woo the corporate and indeed prosumer prospective customer. This is a notebook that doesn’t need to scream to be noticed. In a sea of black and silver laptops from a wide market of vendors, this Dragonfly Blue colour is certainly refreshing take on the form factor, subtle yet slightly iridescent as to liven up things a little. It might sound slightly gushing at this point, but I think when it comes to design, this model is a winner. The fact that the Dragonfly takes itself to even loftier Green prestige by being the first notebook in the world with ocean bound plastics just adds to the package.
I haven’t even talked about the rest of the physical form and my impressions only improve as we move around the chassis. HP redesigned their ultra-lightweight backlit keyboards to be even quieter than ever on this unit, so you can bash out long articles or scroll through spreadsheets with ease and without perturbing anyone else around you. It’s spill resistant and flanked by a wide glass touchpad, which yes, has Windows Precision Driver support for great tracking and gesture support. In addition there’s a multi touch display and even an optional Active Pen 3 for jotting down notes or drawing, which given the display options is certainly interesting.
As for the displays, we have a few different options at our feet. All versions come covered in Corning’s Gorilla Glass 5, 13.3’’ in size and boast IPS panels for superior viewing angles and colour reproduction. In areas of resolution, brightness and colour gamut we have some interesting choices. Two 1080p models with a 72% NTSC gamut, one with 400nits peak brightness, and the other with an eye catching 1000nit brightness and an equally eye thwarting Sure View Integrated Privacy Screen to keep your work environment private from nearby nosey parkers. There’s also a fantastic 4k 550nit variant, again with HP’s Sure View tech but with a NTSC Gamut of 95%. Bar the absence of an OLED option, I think HP have the choices well nailed in this iteration. There’s a 360 Hinge so you can get your tablet, tent, kiosk, or laptop mode on.
This is all backed up by a convincing A-Team of specs, from the up to 24.5 Hours of claimed battery life, a very impressive 65w USB Type C Charger that is deceptively petite in size and weight, a lot less of a clunker than typically associated with a 65w brick, a bevy of security suite features that would make the NSA blush, 16GB of Soldered RAM, up to 512GB of NVMe TLC or QLC NAND with optional Intel Optane H10, Intel UHD 620 for the visuals, Bang and Olufsen quad speaker setup with multi array world-facing microphones, 2×2 WiFi 6(AC) Intel AX200 WiFi and the choice of either Cat9 or Cat16 Intel XMM 7000 series LTE modems, and probably most controversially, 8th Gen Intel Processors with optional vPro support.
Some curious folk out there are probably wondering why HP decided to go with 8th Gen Whiskey Lake over Intel’s brand new 10th Gen Ice Lake silicon, and it’s a very good question to posit. This is something that could easily change over time but the most likely explanation would be the lack of availability of vPro mobile chips from Intel in 10th Gen variety in time for production that made HP go with 8th Gen components. Either way it doesn’t compromise the notebook which is still very zippy and well able to handle work thrown it’s way, just is a shame that it’ll miss out on improvements being brought in with 10th Gen, such as Intel’s newer generation of iGPUs.
Moving right along to the attendee list for the IO party, we have USB C Gen 1 for charging, a Thunderbolt USB C, a full sized HDMI 1.4, Fingerprint Sensor, a Nano SIM Slot for 4G LTE and wait… what’s that? A 3.5mm Headphone jack, is that you!? Yes, even in this anti-analog connector world we seem to have found ourselves in nowadays, 3.5mm still has a home on some new notebooks, like this one. Only glaring omissions for a corporate focused notebook like this is an Ethernet Jack and, yes as old hat as it is, a VGA port, but then again it’s not really feasible to have the latter on anything resembling thin and light so that’s an understandable omission. I can see a lot of business warriors needing and carrying HP’s optional USB-C Mini Dock, which fills in both the aforementioned and also adds two more USB 3 ports and another HDMI.
Possibly the most attractive proposition about the Dragonfly, besides it’s rock solid aesthetics, would be the multitude of security features baked into both software and hardware. Sure Sense is a AI Deep-Learning guardian designed to protect as an additional layer to traditional AV products, specifically to identify and quarantine Zero Day threats, Sure Start Gen5 for HP’s self healing BIOS to protect against UEFI firmware attacks, Sure Click to protect against malicious web sites, randomware and other malware, Sure Run Gen2 to protect Anti Virus from being tampered by malware, Sure Recover with Embedded Reimaging Gen2, an optional feature that enables fast and secured reimaging and recovery from practically anywhere and the Managibility Integration Kit, a Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager hook in that aids in image creation, hardware BIOS and security managment. Combine all that with the 720p Webcam replete with Privacy Filter protection, and display options with HP’s security filter, you can tell this isn’t your average WinTel notebook, this Dragonfly is loaded for bear when it comes to it’s security.
According to HP, this is all part and parcel of their collaboration with Intel towards their Project Athena Program. In similar fashion to what Intel’s Ultrabook category did for the market to push vendors towards exceptional battery life, thinner and lighter form factors and better than ever performance, the Elite Dragonfly is a potent example of both Intel and HP’s vision of innovation in the ultra mobile space. Top Tier connectivity, battery life with stamina to spare, AI for smarter machine learning, nippy performance from CPU to SSD and reliable modern conveniences like Lucid Sleep, Biometric Login and Wake from Sleep of less than 1 second. The tenets of Athena can be easily seen influencing design decisions made with the Dragonfly, all with HP’s taste and tech encompassing it. For the prosumer, the corporate exec, the road warrior who needs a notebook that’ll keep pace with them, Dragonfly has a very compelling feature set in dapper physical form.
Word from HP is the Elite Dragonfly will list for 1299eur in EMEA regions starting November 2019. If we happen to get one across the review desk here at GeekTech, we’ll be sure to update you fine folk. If you’re in the market for a new laptop and have gotten tired of the cheap-o plastic cheap-books and really don’t want a Macbook, HP makes a very interesting case for the Elite Dragonfly.
NB:
HP has not been given copy approval for this article, and therefore are seeing it the same time as our loyal GeekTech fans.
