HP Googlebook 14 unboxing and hands-on: this is Elite [VIDEO]

Back when we first got eyes on Googlebook hardware in New York City, real time with each of the devices was a bit hard to come by. Because of the crowd, the HP Googlebook 14 was one of the Googlebooks I didn’t get to spend much quality time with. Now that we finally have it in hand, taking it out of the box immediately felt familiar in the best way possible: it carries serious HP Dragonfly Chromebook DNA.

Between the deep navy blue finish, the rigid aluminum chassis, and the subtle wedge profile, the build quality here is off the charts. It hovers right around that 3-pound mark, making it plenty portable without feeling hollow. You do get a single USB-C port on each side, a headphone jack, and prominent fan exhausts along the bottom and hinge to keep the Snapdragon X Elite chip breathing. Fair warning: that gorgeous dark finish picks up fingerprints almost immediately, though thankfully they wipe off just as quickly.

A punchy OLED panel and the best keyboard in the lineup

Cracking the lid with a smooth one-finger lift reveals a 14-inch 16:10 OLED display running at 2880×1800 with 500 nits of brightness. Unlike the other Googlebooks we’ve opened with matte, anti-glare coatings, HP opted for a clean, glossy finish. While you’ll have to manage direct reflections in bright spots, skipping that anti-glare layer gives you inky blacks, razor-sharp text, and phenomenal color saturation. Sitting up top is a 5MP webcam with a physical privacy shutter that punches noticeably above standard 1080p laptop cams.

The real star of the show once you start typing, though, is the keyboard. HP has built some of the best typing surfaces in portable computing over the years, and they nailed the feel here. It has crisp travel, great tactile feedback, and is easily my favorite keyboard on a Googlebook so far. That’s paired with a quiet, responsive haptic glass trackpad and all the biometrics you need, including a snappy fingerprint reader integrated into the power button (complete with a neat blue prompt light) and reliable IR Face Unlock that recognized me even with glasses on.

Snapdragon power and seamless phone synergy

Under the hood, the HP is packing the Snapdragon X Elite alongside 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Alongside the Dell XPS Googlebook, this is our second look at Qualcomm silicon inside Googlebook OS, and early synthetic benchmarks suggest these chips are outpacing the Intel-based options in both single and multi-core output. Flanked by surprisingly rich speakers, the hardware package is absolutely complete.

There are also the cross-device perks that make Googlebook OS genuinely convenient when paired with an Android phone. Features like Continue On let you jump straight to whatever browser tab or doc you were viewing on your phone right from the desktop shelf. You can cast phone apps like DoorDash in floating windows without installing them locally, browse your phone’s camera roll directly inside the native Files app up to 200MB per file, and dismiss incoming notifications across both devices simultaneously.

At $1,299, it commands a flagship price tag, but the fit and finish justify the premium. We’ll be putting it through the standard paces to see how that Snapdragon chip handles battery life and real-world multitasking as full reviews approach. And as we’ve said in other places, this is simply an unboxing and hands-on with the hardware itself. For thoughts on Googlebook OS and where Google is going with all this, you can read (or watch) my deeper thoughts – both good and bad – right over here.