HP Pavilion x360 14 LTE (2020) – Review 2020

When we reviewed the HP Pavilion x360 14 some 13 months ago, we griped that its $699.99 price bought you only 128GB of solid-state storage. Not only has HP fixed that with a 256GB drive, but this year’s model has a SIM card slot for LTE mobile broadband, keeping you connected when there’s no Wi-Fi hotspot around. Those improvements aside, the Pavilion remains a likable choice among 14-inch convertible laptops. It’s a little heavy and a little poky in performance tests compared to the Editors’ Choice Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14, but the convenience of LTE will attract its fair share of buyers.

Losing a Millimeter or Two

At 0.74 by 12.8 by 8.7 inches, the HP is also a hair thinner than last year’s version, but at 3.55 pounds it’s slightly overweight—the Lenovo Flex and Acer Spin 3 are 3.3 pounds each, and the LG Gram 14 2-in-1 is a feathery 2.53 pounds. You’ll likely hold the Pavilion in your lap instead of in your hands in tablet mode.

HP continues to play with contrasting colors in a way that sets its systems apart from run-of-the-mill notebooks. A dark, brushed-metal keyboard and palm rest offset the convertible’s silver finish. There’s a chrome HP logo centered in the lid. Concave edges help you open the laptop with one hand.

The system bolsters its 256GB NVMe SSD with 16GB of Intel Optane Memory. It carries 8GB of RAM and a quad-core, 1.0GHz Intel Core i5-1035G1 processor, as well as a 14-inch touch screen with full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution. Two hinges let you fold the display into laptop, tablet, tent, and easel configurations. The screen wobbles just a bit when tapped in laptop mode, and there’s some flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck.

You’ll find a USB 3.2 Type-A port and an audio jack on the Pavilion’s left side. Another USB-A port joins a USB Type-C port, an HDMI video output, and an SD card slot, along with the SIM slot and a connector for the AC adapter, on the right.

Sound and Selfies

The webcam offers ordinary 720p resolution but better-than-average color and clarity. In its image, it was easy to see the fine pattern of my shirt and unruly strands of my hair. Sound from the top-firing speakers is a touch hollow or boomy with the volume cranked up. At more moderate levels, though, it’s quite good, predictably short on bass but with clear highs and midtones and easily distinguished overlapping tracks.

The screen isn’t very vivid—colors are present but don’t pop. The touch overlay’s glass gives it a mirror-like sheen that can reflect room lighting, but contrast is decent and white backgrounds are indeed white. Screen viewability outdoors will be a challenge; I could wish for some extra brightness. (HP rates the display at 250 nits, though a sunnier 400-nit panel is an option.) That said, the off-center viewing angles are broad on my test unit’s display, and fine details look sharp.

It seems as if I’ve spent my reviewing career complaining about HP laptops’ arrangement of the cursor arrow keys in a row, with half-height up and down arrows sandwiched between full-size left and right, rather than the correct inverted T. If you can get past that, the keyboard layout is fine, with dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys and Ctrl and Delete in their proper opposite corners. Typing feel is shallow but snappy.

The good-size, buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly. Left and right clicks take just the right amount of pressure, and scrolling and gestures are precise.

The Windows 10 Home software preload includes a McAfee LiveSafe trial and Dropbox, Booking.com, and ExpressVPN promotions. HP backs the convertible with a one-year warranty.

Performance Testing: Outrun by Ryzens

I compared the Pavilion’s performance numbers to those of four other convertibles. The Acer Spin 3, Lenovo Yoga C740, and Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14 have 14-inch screens; HP’s Envy x360 has a 13.3-inch panel. You can see their basic specs in the table below.

Productivity and Media Tests

PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet wrestling, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better. (See how we test laptops.)

The Pavilion was just a whisker short of the 4,000 points that we consider excellent in PCMark 10. It joined the other SSD-based convertibles in breezing through PCMark 8’s storage subtest, cementing its status as a solid productivity partner.

Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.

Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing benchmark, in which we put a stopwatch on systems as they transcode a brief movie from 4K resolution down to 1080p. It, too, is a tough test for multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs; lower times are better.

The AMD Ryzen 5-powered IdeaPad and Envy dominated these events, while the Pavilion landed at the back of the pack. It’s fine for routine spreadsheets but unlikely to be mistaken for a workstation-style media editing or rendering machine.

We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total (lower times are better). The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters.

The Pavilion and Spin 3 trailed here, too, though they’ll only keep you waiting an extra few seconds per Photoshop filter or editing operation. Occasional image touch-ups will be fine. The Ryzen 4000-series-based laptops once again set the pace.

Graphics Tests

3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and lets high-end PCs and gaming rigs strut their stuff.

The Ryzens and their integrated Radeon graphics solutions led the systems with Intel UHD integrated graphics, but even they are crushed by gaming laptops with dedicated GPUs. All these convertibles are strictly for casual or browser-based games, not demanding 3D titles.

Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene, this one rendered in the eponymous Unigine engine, for a second opinion on the machine’s graphical prowess. We present two Superposition results, run at the 720p Low and 1080p High presets and reported in frames per second (fps), indicating how smooth the scene looks in motion.

This gaming simulation defeated the laptops just as 3DMark did and just as real games would. Again, these machines aren’t intended for gamers. You might eke out some decent play with the Radeons at 720p and low settings, but even that is a stretch for anything beyond casual games.

Battery Rundown Test

After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system quits.

The Pavilion will get you through a full workday on a charge, even if its runtime is a few hours short of what we like to see in this class of system.

A Solid-Enough Choice in a Crowded Field

The Pavilion x360 14 LTE doesn’t have the star wattage of HP’s Spectre or Elite Dragonfly portables, but it’s a lot more affordable, and this year’s addition of mobile broadband helps it stay competitive in a bustling market segment. If it were slightly lighter and slightly quicker, it would be an Editors’ Choice contender, but even as is, it has plenty to recommend it, especially if you need a budget option that can work away from Wi-Fi.

HP Pavilion x360 14 LTE (2020) Specs

Best Laptop Picks

Laptop Product Comparisons

Further Reading