HP Pavilion Plus 14 Review: Good value for money

While the specifications are great for performance, they take their toll on the battery life. (Image: HP)

HP's Pavilion line-up has always been known for value. It has traditionally included laptops that have been aggressively priced with their lightweight as the primary selling point.

With Plus 14, HP is dipping its toes into the premium market with the line-up. It now comes with an OLED screen, 13th Generation Intel CPUs, and of course, the trademark lightweight, all while still maintaining an aggressive price point below Rs 1 lakh, how does the Pavilion Plus 14 fare against the competition?

Design

The first thing you immediately notice when you pick it up is how light it is. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has used a Pavilion before but the 1.4 kg laptop feels nearly feather-like in your hands. This isn't the lightest laptop in the world but the weight makes a huge difference when you lug it around.

The build quality of the chassis is also superb with aluminum used for the material. It tends to wobble a bit when fully open but that isn't too much of an issue. The keyboard is nicely spaced with enough room from larger hands. The trackpad is nice and wide as well.

As for the ports, you get a good assortment of options here. There is 1 Thunderbolt 4 port with USB Type-C with 40Gbps signaling rate, capable of power delivery, 2 USB Type-A ports (10Gbps and 5Gbps), 1 HDMI 2.1 out and a headphone/microphone combo port.

Performance

Our review unit came with Intel's Core i7-1355U processor, 16GB DDR5 RAM, on-board Intel Iris Xe graphics and Windows 11 pre-installed.

The Core i7 is more than powerful enough to get through a work day, handling multiple tabs and open snap layouts without a hitch. It even handled heavy instances of multiple desktop layouts using Windows Task View.

Despite not being marketed as a workstation because of the lack of dedicated GPUs, the Pavilion 14 Plus was able to handle everything I threw at it without too many problems.

The 14 inch OLED display has a 16:10 ration with a resolution of 2880x1800 and a refresh rate of 90Hz. The screen consistently delivers deep blacks and whites with great contrast and sharp detail. It even gets plenty bright outdoors with SDR rated at 400 nits and HDR at 500.

The 16GB RAM is soldered on to the motherboard which means it can't be upgraded. Thankfully, you can upgrade the storage and our review model came with a 512GB NVMe PCIe SSD by default, that can upgraded to 1TB NVMe PCIe SSD.

The 5-megapixel webcam is decent and comes with an array of options that can be selected using the myHP app that is pre-installed. It comes with features such as auto-framing that keeps you centered in frame, several lighting adjustments and much more.

The problems

While the webcam is good, it doesn't support Windows Hello logins which is a bit of a missed opportunity. HP does provide a dedicated button on the keyboard to kill the webcam feed quickly but a physical shutter to cover the lens would have been nice.

While the specifications are great for performance, they take their toll on the battery life. With normal usage, which includes web, video and some light gaming, I was reaching for the charger within just five hours or so. With heavy use, expect it drain even faster. On average, the laptop lasted about six hours on a single charge, which isn't a disaster but it could be much better.

Thankfully, this is mitigated somewhat by the presence of fast charging. HP says that you can charge up to 50% in 45 minutes, but in my experience, it averaged between 40% to 45%. Still, it's a great option to have in a pinch.

Conclusion

The HP Pavilion Plus 14 is an excellent package overall. It has great performance, a fantastic screen, and a good webcam, which makes it an ideal work device.

The battery life, however, is far from ideal and it also comes with a lot of bloatware pre-installed on the system.

If you are willing to overlook these problems, the base model with a 13th Gen Intel Core i5 processor offers good value for money, starting at Rs 90,999. The Core-i7 model reviewed here costs Rs 99,999.