Cons: so-so display and dull design

Work laptops generally fall into two categories: the sort you pick yourself and the sort that your employer just hands you as a standard tool.

HP’s Probook X360 435 G7 is almost an exact combination of both.

Overall, it’s flexible, light, reasonably powered laptop with good security and privacy features and a decent selection of connections. It’s slim and nimble enough to fit into almost any reasonably sized bag, while its 360-hinge lets you vary the touchscreen’s use from a conventional laptop to a multi-media (or digital ink) friendly tablet. These are the reasons you might pick it out for yourself.

On the other hand, its design is dully conventional, something of a cookie-cutter silver grey plastic and aluminium composition with sharpish edges and fat bezels around the screen. It also has a mediocre webcam and a not-more-than-reasonable keyboard. These feel like the compromises that are acceptable to a middle manager signing off on the staff laptops (for you, among others).

One of the main physical distinctions to this Probook is the flexibility of its 360-degree hinge. This lets you do flip the whole thing around to stand in a tent mode. It’s well capable of doing this at several angles thanks to its sturdy, firm hinges.

The Probook’s 13.3-inch full HD, touchscreen display is a little disappointing for this price point.

While perfectly competent, it’s not exactly stunning. It has one of the lowest maximum brightness levels of a laptop I’ve encountered in some time, with a top reach of 350 nits. That’s never really a problem indoors, but if you’re working in the back garden or at an outside cafe table, this laptop’s screen is just a little harder to see in sunshine than many others.

A second compromise comes in the unusually large, fat bezels at the top and bottom of the display. This makes it look a little old-fashioned and increases the size of the overall laptop more than it needs to be.

On the plus side, HP has resisted the modern laptop trend of just putting a couple of USB-C ports and little else. In a nod to the diversity of connections and cables that most people still have, you’ll find a two old-fashioned USB-A ports here, as well as a USB-C port (which can be used to charge the laptop) and a full-sized HDMI port. There’s also a conventional 3.5mm headphone port and a MicroSD memory card slot.

One of the main engine-related features of this Probook is that it uses AMD Ryzen chips instead of Intel ones. For instance, my test model came with a Ryzen 7 4700, roughly equivalent to an Intel Core i7. While these are slightly cheaper than Intel chips, they’re honestly now as good. Together with the 16GB of Ram under the hood, my test model (with 512GB of storage, putting it well over the €1,000 price bracket) fairly blazed through virtually all work-related tasks. I’d definitely recommend a Ryzen chip as a reliable alternative if you need to save a bit of cash somewhere.

One slightly bizarre setup on the Probook is the camera array. The main camera at the top of the screen is actually pretty poor — a bog standard 720p (1-megapixel) webcam that is shy on detail and low light ability. But there’s also a secondary (5-megapixel) camera in the lower left corner of the laptop. This is supposed to be aimed at letting you capture photos to the rear of the machine when you have it turned around on its hinge in tent mode. But you won’t ever use this for Zoom calls when it’s flipped around on its hinge as that puts the webcam in an unflattering position at the bottom of the screen, looking up your nose.

Ironically, the quality from the secondary camera is far better than the webcam, which seems the opposite of what most people might want.

However, one feature that the main webcam does have is a physical shutter which you can slide on or off. This is just one of the fairly impressive range of security features that this laptop comes with.

The handiest one, by far, for me is the little fingerprint authentication square. This wakes up the laptop almost immediately. But it also acts as an excellent security lock.

The ‘Sure View’ screen is also security-conscious, being deliberately difficult to see from angles other than a head-on view. This is supposed to ease your concerns about snooping eyes in airport travel lounges or cafés.

As for its other features, the keyboard is fine, but unremarkable; if typing is one of your two or three priorities when buying a laptop, this doesn’t hold up to rivals such as Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 4 or Lenovo’s ThinkPads.

And while the speaker looks big and impressive, it’s actually fairly tinny. But again, it’s what to expect at around this price point.

So what are the reasons to buy this laptop? The 360-degree hinge is one, as are the security controls. The relatively generous diversity of connection ports could be another reason.

I suspect the main reason will be that this laptop has a bit of everything at a somewhat reasonable price.