HP Pavilion x360 (11-inch) review: HP Pavilion x360 offers Yoga-like flexibility for less

If hybrid laptops have a theme so far in 2014, it's the rise of the Yoga-like. This is a term we use for systems with an all-the-way-back hinge like on Lenovo's popular Yoga line of laptops, as well as me-too models from Dell and others. One of the newest and least expensive of these is the 11-inch HP Pavilion x360.

This version starts at a low $399 in the US, which means it runs Intel Pentium chips, rather than the more mainstream Core i-series CPUs (although that's mostly fine for an 11-inch laptop). Prices begin at £329 in the UK and AU$599 in Australia.

HP says the x360 is aimed at millennials looking for a single device for work and play, and one goal for this system was to produce an affordable convertible that's accessible to anyone. Since we first heard about the x360, we've seen budget versions of similar 11-inch hybrid designs from Dell and Lenovo, which means the fold-back hinge may soon be as commonplace among budget laptop shoppers as netbooks were several years ago.

There are, of course, trade-offs with taking designs that started in $1,000-plus laptops and bringing them down below $500. The look, while muted and modern, is bigger, thicker, and heavier than you may be used to from an 11-inch ultraportable. The screen in particular has a budget feel, with poor off-axis viewing -- especially troublesome for a tablet meant to be viewed from many angles.

But it's also less expensive than the otherwise similar 11-inch Yoga 2 from Lenovo. Our configuration of the normally $399 x360 doubled the RAM from 4GB to 8GB, resulting in a final price of $474. (Configuration options are not widely available outside of the US.) The Yoga 2, while slimmer and with a better screen, is $479 in a Best Buy configuration with only 4GB of RAM (other configurations are available on the sometimes-confusing Lenovo US website).

That's the trade-off between these two models. For roughly the same price, you can get more RAM in the HP x360, or a smaller, lighter design and better screen in the Yoga 2. I'm inclined to lean toward the Yoga, thinking the easier-to-see display outweighs the small performance boost the extra RAM in the HP x360 gives you. That said, the entry-level x360 is only $399, and that's a price Lenovo can't currently touch.

Geek Box

	HP Pavilion 11 x360	Lenovo Yoga 2 (11-inch)	Dell XPS 11
Price as reviewed	$474	$449	$1,399
Display size/resolution	11.6-inch 1,366 x 768 touch screen	11.6-inch 1,366 x 768 touch screen	11.6-inch 2,560 x 1,440 touch screen
PC CPU	2.16GHz Intel Pentium N3520	2.16GHz Intel Pentium N3520	1.5GHz Intel Core i5 4210Y
PC Memory	8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz	4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz	4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz
Graphics	32MB Intel HD Graphics	32MB Intel HD Graphics	1792MB (shared) Intel HD Graphics HD 4200
Storage	500GB 5,400rpm HDD	500GB 5,400rpm HDD	256GB SSD
Optical drive	None	None	None
Networking	802.11b/g/n wireless, Bluetooth 4.0	802.11b/g/n wireless, Bluetooth 4.0	802.11a/c wireless, Bluetooth 4.0
Operating system	Windows 8.1 (64-bit)	Windows 8.1 (64-bit)	Windows 8.1 (64-bit)

Design and features

The idea of the 360-degree fold-back hinge is that you can use the system as a traditional laptop, then bend the lid backward, stopping at a kiosk or table-tent form in the middle or folding it all the way back into a tablet orientation.

It's an appealing concept, and one we've supported since the original Lenovo Yoga model launched alongside Windows 8, paving the way for a burst of creativity in inventive hybrid designs that melded laptop and tablet. In the end, this design seems to have won out, thanks to two reasons: it does the least to interfere with the traditional clamshell laptop design, and it's relatively inexpensive to engineer, compared to pull-apart or slider-style hybrid hinges.

The x360 is bigger and heavier than other 11-inch systems, hybrid or otherwise. The rounded corners and playful design gives it an accessible, consumer-gadget feel, but holding it in one hand in tablet mode is awkward. The x360 weighs 3.3 pounds (1.5 kg), while the 11-inch Yoga 2 is only 2.8 pounds (1.3 kg). By way of comparison, the 11-inch MacBook Air is 2.4 pounds (1.1 kg).

But as a budget ultraportable laptop, the x360 works well, with a full-size keyboard and a large, wide, touchpad. Like many HP laptops, the top row of function keys are reversed, which means you can adjust the screen brightness, volume, and other features without holding down the Fn key. The island-style keys have a tiny bit of texture to them, which helps grip the fingers, but the keys are also shallow and wiggle a good bit, even under light typing. Still, it's better than decent for a budget laptop keyboard.

The wide touchpad, another HP staple, also translates well in the budget version presented here. It's a clickpad-style pad, giving you a larger touch surface without separate left and right mouse buttons, but the plastic surface doesn't feel as natural as more-expensive glass versions. Multitouch gestures, such as two-finger scrolling, work surprisingly well, although on a system such as this, you're likely to do a lot of your on-screen nav from the touchscreen.

It's that 11.6-inch touchscreen that holds the x360 back more than any other single feature. With a 1,366x768-pixel native resolution, it's comparable to the 11-inch Yoga 2, the 11-inch MacBook Air, and many other 11-inch laptops, but the screen here is washed-out and often hard to see. The screen doesn't get especially bright, and coupled with an excessively glossy overlay, that means it's virtually unusable, even in modest sunlight.

Between this model and the 11-inch Yoga 2, the difference in display quality is huge, even at a casual glance. A poor display can undo an otherwise worthwhile laptop, and especially if you're planning to share content in the system's kiosk or tablet modes, it could be a dealbreaker.

The system loudly proclaims its Beats Audio branding via a large logo right on the interior hinge, but with Apple's recent deal to buy the audio company, this is a feature that probably won't make it to future versions of the x360. (HP has the right to build Beats systems for the rest of 2014 and to sell stock until the end of 2015.) It's a small loss in a low-cost ultraportable, as the Beats branding referred only to some software tweaks for deeper sound, mostly EQ presets, and not any actual Beats speaker hardware.

Ports and connections

	HP Pavilion x360
Video	HDMI
Audio	Stereo speakers, combo headphone/microphone jack
Data	1 USB 3.0, 2 USB 2.0, SD card reader
Networking	Ethernet, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth
Optical drive	None

Connections, performance, and battery

Compared to many other ultraportable laptops, even the $899 11-inch MacBook Air, the x360 has a very generous selection of ports, including HDMI out, an SD card slot, and a full-size Ethernet jack. That's great -- if you need a small laptop with the ability to easily connect to a wired Internet setup, it's a big vote in this system's favor.

The Pavilion x360, in either its $399 base model or the $474 upgrade we tested, has the same CPU, a 2.16GHz Intel Pentium N3530. That's the exact same processor as in our Lenovo Yoga 2 11-inch unit, although that hybrid can be configured with Intel Core i-series CPUs for a few hundred dollars more.

If you expect mainstream laptop performance, on par with your 15-inch or larger $1,000-plus machine, you're not going to get that. Both the x360 and the Yoga 2 felt sluggish at times, especially when working in the traditional Windows desktop view and menus or when starting up. To Microsoft's credit, the tile-based Windows 8 interface is fast and responsive with virtually any processor, and the preloaded native Windows 8 apps in it work great.

Comparing this system with the Yoga 2, the x360 ran some of our benchmark tests faster, but not by a large margin. The extra RAM, 8GB versus 4GB, likely gets the credit here. Trading up to a Core i-series processor would yield a big boost in application performance but would also cost much more.

Battery life is always a strong selling point for both ultraportable laptops and tablets, so you'd think HP would make this a major feature of the x360 hybrid. Unfortunately, despite the low-power CPU, battery life here was merely average, running for 4 hours 47 minutes in our video-playback battery-drain test. The Yoga 2, with the same CPU, ran a bit longer at 5 hours 35 minutes. Ironically, you really have to trade up to a more powerful Core i-series system to get the full benefit of Intel's recent battery-life gains.

Conclusion

By taking the Yoga's popular foldback hinge design and making it available for as little as $399/£329/AU$599, the HP Pavilion x360 performs a valuable service, and should be commended for that, as well as for being a budget laptop with a better-than-expected typing experience and plenty of ports and connections.

If you're willing to work with the limited performance expectations that come from using a low-cost, low-power platform, it seems like a sure thing on paper, but the frustrating screen quality is enough to make me want to spend a little more for the 11-inch version of Lenovo Yoga 2.

Handbrake multimedia multitasking test

Lenovo Ideatab Miix 2 1,001Lenovo Yoga 2 (11-inch) 760Dell XPS 11 751HP Pavilion 11 x360 746Lenovo Yoga 2 (13-inch) 475

Adobe Photoshop CS5 image-processing test

Lenovo Yoga 2 (11-inch) 599HP Pavilion 11 x360 477Dell XPS 11 341Lenovo Yoga 2 (13-inch) 310

Apple iTunes encoding test

Lenovo Ideatab Miix 2 398Lenovo Yoga 2 (11-inch) 313HP Pavilion 11 x360 312Dell XPS 11 167Lenovo Yoga 2 (13-inch) 124

Video playback battery drain test

HP Pavilion 11 x360 287Lenovo Yoga 2 (11-inch) 335Dell XPS 11 388Lenovo Yoga 2 (13-inch) 435Lenovo Ideatab Miix 2 442

System Configurations

HP Pavilion 11 x360

Windows 8.1 (64.bit); 2.16GHZ Intel Pentium N3520 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1333MHz;32MB (dedicated) Intel HD Graphics; 500GB HDD

Lenovo Yoga 2 (11-inch)

Windows 8.1 (64.bit); 2.16GHZ Intel Pentium N3520 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1333MHz;32MB (dedicated) Intel HD Graphics; 500GB HDD

Lenovo Yoga 2 (13-inch)

Windows 8.1 (64-bit); 1.6GHz; Intel Core i5-4200; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1600MHz, 1792MB (shared) Intel HD Graphics 4400; 500GB SSHD

Dell XPS 11

Windows 8.1 (64-bit); 1.5GHz Intel Core i5-4210Y; 4GB DDR3 SDRAM 1600MHz; 1792MB (sharedl) Intel HD Graphics 4200; 128GB SSD

Lenovo Ideatab Miix 2

Windows 8.1 (32-bit); 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z3740; 2GB DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz; 32MB (dedicated) Intel HD Graphics; 128GB SSD

Find more shopping tips in our Laptop Buying Guide.