HP’s newest budget laptop, the Pavilion x360 14, will be available this summer for a starting price of $599, the company has announced. The clamshell, higher-end Pavilion Plus 14 — HP’s thinnest ever Pavilion model at 0.65 inches — is another addition to the line, available now for a starting price of $799.
The new x360 14 also has optional 5G support via Intel’s 5G Solution 5000. While we don’t know exactly how much the 5G-enabled model will cost, the $599 base price makes it likely that this will be one of the most affordable ways to get 5G on a laptop this year (many other 5G-enabled models cost well over $1,000).
The Pavilion x360 14 will also be HP’s first consumer laptop to include a manual camera shutter — another feature uncommon at this price point. While hardware kill switches appear in HP’s consumer lines, a manual shutter covers the lens for extra peace of mind. (These can also be very satisfying to click open and shut.)
The Pavilion has also been updated to Intel’s latest 12th Gen Intel Core U-series processors. Alongside the Pavilion Plus, the x360 14 will include a 5MP camera with AI-based noise reduction and presence detection technology. This feature, if enabled, allows the laptop to know whether you’re in front of it or not and can do things like automatically lock your PC when you walk away.
In the past, the HP Pavilion line has served as one of the most affordable ways to access laptop-based LTE. But our experiences with 4G Pavilions have not been the most impressive in the past — the last Pavilion x360 model with LTE that we reviewed was fairly slow for anything more than basic tasks and, even with the added connectivity, wasn’t a great buy. We’re now two generations of Intel processors past that device, so hopefully the jump to 5G combined with the new chip architecture will lead to a budget 5G device we can more enthusiastically recommend.
