Top 5 reasons to BUY or NOT to buy the HP Elite Dragonfly G2

Most of the time security and privacy come at a premium. Such is the case of the HP Elite Dragonfly G2, which might as well be the most secure laptop on the market right now. The G1 device needed some thorough fixes, especially when it came to the SureView technology, which didn’t serve its purpose at all.

Now, its successor promises improvements in the performance, thanks to Tiger Lake, and to the overall package. It does that in an incredibly portable body, which will outright shock you.

Today we are presenting you with LaptopMedia’s top 5 picks about the HP Elite Dragonfly G2.

HP Elite Dragonfly G2: Full Specs / In-depth Review


4 reasons to BUY the HP Elite Dragonfly G2

1. Design and build quality

The laptop comes in a very portable magnesium chassis, which weighs less than a kilogram – completely insane, even for a convertible, especially when considering the level of powerful hardware that it brings to the table. The design screams premium even before you set eyes on the notebook itself, as the unboxing experience is exceptional, with a braided power cable and a stylus pen inside the box, justifying the premium price tag. The whole body has a matte finish, which keeps fingerprints and smudges at a distance, with the magnesium body providing a great level of structural integrity, despite the 16 mm profile.

The lid opens with a single hand, albeit with some difficulty. But, due to the convertible nature, we are okay with that since you need stronger hinges that can last longer as the device is constantly switched between tablet and laptop mode.


2. Display

The laptop is offered with two 13.3-inch IPS panels, one with a Full HD resolution and one with a 4K resolution. Our device had the Full HD display, which delivered comfortable viewing angles (provided that you turn the SureView feature off).

The display comes with a max brightness of 860 nits in the middle of the screen, which is one of the highest that we have ever tested, and 871 nits as an average for the entire area of the panel, calculating a deviation of 7%. The contrast ratio is also really high, sitting at 2100:1. The panel covers 88% of the sRGB color gamut, which isn’t ideal, especially for the price.

The color accuracy improved significantly when we applied our Design and Gaming profile, bringing down the dE value to 1.9, which is very close to the standard. Here are the results of the Color accuracy test with both the factory settings (left) and with our Design and Gaming profile (right).


Buy our profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package are meant for HP Elite Dragonfly G2 configurations with 13.3″ IVO X133NVFF R0 (IVO8596) (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS panel.

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at [email protected].

Read more about the profiles HERE.

In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

Health-Guard

Health-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

Get all 3 profiles with 33% discount


3. Speakers and Input devices

The laptop comes with an amazing set of quad-stereo speakers, with the grills for two of them being seen on the left and right sides of the base. They are provided by Bang & Olufsen and provide excellent high-quality audio with no deviations across the entire frequency range.

The keyboard and touchpad combination is also on a fantastic level, as the keyboard has quite large keycaps (except for the up and down arrow keys). The unit has long key travel and clicky feedback that is surprisingly quiet. The touchpad is very responsive, smooth gliding and accurate tracking.


4. Battery life and i/O

The Dragonfly G2 comes with a 56Wh battery unit, which performed relatively well in our battery tests, lasting for 11 hours and 40 minutes of Web browsing, and 12 hours and 2 minutes of video playback. As with all of our battery tests, we have the Windows Better performance setting turned on, screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits, and all other programs turned off except for the one we are testing the notebook with.

The device also has a narrow, but effective I/O. The ports are split between the left and right sides, with the left housing a USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 1), the Power button, and an optional SIM card tray. On the opposite side, there is an HDMI connector, a 3.5 mm audio jack, and two Thunderbolt 4 ports.


1 reason NOT to buy the HP Elite Dragonfly G2

1. Upgradeability

Lastly, the laptop’s upgradeability was the sacrifice that HP made, in order to accommodate for other areas. The Dragonfly G2 comes with all of its memory soldered onto the motherboard. On the other hand, the storage is upgradeable through one M.2 PCIe x4 drive.

Here is our teardown video, which can give you a better grasp of the location of the battery, cooling, and the single M.2 PCIe x4 slot, in case you want to upgrade the device.


All HP Elite Dragonfly G2 configurations:

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