HP OmniBook X 14 review: A business laptop by any other name

The freshman class of Windows Copilot Plus PCs has its battery champion, and it’s up to a few hundred dollars cheaper than Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop. But it’s also boring business-class, with an average screen and a below-average trackpad.

What’s new from HP OmniBook X 14 It’s one of the first laptops with Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite processor. Like most of the ones we’ve seen so far, it’s a thin and light machine aimed at productivity tasks and packed with AI insights. It starts at $1,150, with a 14-inch LCD screen, 12-core processor, 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD – with an optional upgrade to a 1TB drive for $1,200, though it’s often on sale. sell for less.

Most of the other Windows laptops we’ve seen with these new Arm chips have gorgeous, bright screens and other creature comforts. The OmniBook, on the other hand, is almost a clone of the HP EliteBook Ultraa machine built for deployment in high-volume offices, and it shows.

Weighing in at 2.97 pounds and just over half an inch thick, the OmniBook X is about the same size as the 13-inch MacBook Air, which seems to be the brand most of these Copilot Plus PCs are aiming for. And it comes closer to the battery life of my work Air than any other laptop we’ve tested.

The OmniBook It rarely stutters or slows down, even when my active Chrome tabs grow to more than 20 or 30 on some virtual desktops. It holds a charge well overnight – even spending an entire weekend unplugged with the lid closed and losing just 10% of the battery.

This is the first time in a long time that I’ve used a Windows laptop that doesn’t make me anxious about the battery. It’s a welcome benefit of the Snapdragon X’s efficiency combined with the OmniBook’s generous 59Wh battery. Other Copilot Plus PCs, like the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x and Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge, actually have larger batteries, but the OmniBook’s 16:10 60Hz IPS LCD uses less power than its brighter, faster OLED displays (more on this in a bit).

If battery life is more important to you than anything else, the OmniBook is worth considering. It’s certainly a more concrete benefit than any of the over-the-top AI features that make it a PC Copilot Plus. But the hardware it inherits from the EliteBook Ultra – like the trackpad, speakers and screen – makes long hours away from the outlet a chore.

The trackpad is basically fine, but its top-hinged click mechanism means you feel more resistance when clicking higher on the pad. It doesn’t feel as nice as the modern haptics on MacBooks or the Surface Laptop, which let you click anywhere with ease. And right-clicks with two fingers often result in an unintended left click. The only thing worse than something that doesn’t work is something that doesn’t work consistently.

But that brings me to the speakers, who are consistently bad. They’re useful for video calls, but their downward-firing orientation toward the front of the case makes music sound faint when the laptop sits on a table. Place it on your lap and it feels like it’s underwater. The upward-facing speakers on many other laptops, including those under the MacBook Air’s keyboard, are far superior. Even my iPhone 15 Pro sounds a little better, with the OmniBook’s only advantage being that its two speakers are about seven inches apart to provide a tiny bit of soundstage. But this placement also means your wrists often block the speakers when you type.

The 14-inch touchscreen LCD with 2240 x 1400 resolution looks sharp and quite colorful, covering the entire sRGB color space and 78 percent of DCI-P3 in my tests. The screen’s claimed maximum brightness of 300 nits (337 nits in my testing) is fine indoors, but quite weak for outdoor use. If you sit near a bright window or go outside, it may feel like you’re trying to work in a mirror. Its refresh rate is an equally modest 60Hz. By comparison, the new Surface Laptop’s LCD screen is twice as fast, nearly twice as bright, has more accurate colors, and supports HDR, for a similar price.

On the sides of the OmniBook are a total of four ports: two USB-C PD ports on the left (one 40 Gbps and one 10 Gbps, each capable of DisplayPort 1.4a output to a monitor) and, on the right, a single USB-A port (10Gbps) alongside a 3.5mm headphone/mic combo jack. The chiclet-style keyboard is good for typing for hours at a time and has a Copilot button that I bet you’ll use as little as I do. My only real complaint with the keyboard is the tall left and right arrow keys. I would prefer them to be the same height as the down arrow as it makes it much easier to find the keys without searching.

Windows on Arm support is already in a much better position than it was a few years ago now that Snapdragon X is here and the first range of Copilot Plus PCs are available. But if an app you really need isn’t supported, the OmniBook (or any Arm PC) is a failure. Programs like Adobe Premiere Pro and Illustrator remain absent or limited to emulation for now. For me, the lack of Adobe Lightroom Classic is a deal-breaker. I hate editing photos in Lightroom CC, with its completely rearranged layout and shortcuts. App compatibility should keep getting better, but you should never buy something now based on what it is it could do in the future.

The OmniBook’s AI features are mostly boring and inconsequential – especially as Windows Recall continues to lag. They consist of the “AI experiences” provided with Copilot Plus PCs, plus HP’s AI Companion app. It’s basically bloatware: just another ChatGPT wrapper along with some hardware performance monitoring. (It can also download drivers. How innovative!) The current beta limits you to eight follow-up requests for each query, which I bet is to reduce the chances of hallucinations.

You can also feed AI Companion documents, which will attempt to summarize. In an initial briefing with HP, a representative demonstrated how a hiring manager can upload three resumes and ask AI to compare the candidates. I can’t stress this enough: this is something you shouldn’t do.

A good screen, trackpad and speakers are a given in a modern laptop. Compared to competitors like the new Surface Laptop and Surface Pro 11 with high-refresh screens and tactile trackpads, the OmniBook X is lackluster — with the exception of excellent battery life.

But the reason the OmniBook is a little dull is because it’s a corporate laptop in disguise. Other than the color options, Wi-Fi card, and Bluetooth radio, it’s nearly identical to the EliteBook Ultra, which is the type of “BoringBook” issued en masse by company IT departments. The corporate world isn’t concerned with giving you a bright, smooth OLED screen or powerful bass – it just wants you to feed the beast and do its job with tools that are adequate and not too expensive.

If you truly worship at the altar of battery life, then perhaps the OmniBook is fine. But there’s no reason to pay a thousand dollars of your own money for that screen, those speakers, or that trackpad. Maybe you can use the OmniBook

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge