- RATING
The HP EliteBook Ultra G1i is a sleek and light laptop that offers impressive power and performance for the business user or prosumer. It provides an exceptional experience whether you're using it for work or play.
The HP EliteBook Ultra G1i laptop means business. It is light and compact yet offers business and high-end customers power and performance on the move.
The device is aimed at the professional user and includes a range of abilities and features.
Starting with the design, the HP EliteBook Ultra G1i is a stunner.
It has a gorgeous Atmospheric Blue colour – a nice alternative from the usual black laptops we see – and is made from lightweight aluminium. It weighs just 1.2kg.
The build quality is superb with subtle rounded edges that give the laptop a premium look and feel.
The hinges are also smooth and easy to open. In fact, the lid can easily be opened with just one finger.
One when you do open it, you’re presented with the stunning 14-inch 2.8K OLED display.
It has a 120Hz touch display that offers amazing colour and 400 nits brightness.
It also has narrow bezels so the screen goes almost edge to edge.
We like the wider 16:10 aspect ratio – more rectangular than square.
This shape still offers a wide view for browsing and apps and is perfect when it’s time to kick back and watch a movie.
The display has a gloss finish which is great when you’re inside but quite reflective when you’re working outside. Not a deal breaker – but something you need to navigate.
Another luxurious part of the laptop is the backlit keyboard and trackpad.
The keyboard has made up of nice large well-spaced keys so for terrible typists like me can spend less time correcting our mistakes.
The top row of functions keys are a different colour and standout nicely to access the often used features like volume and media playback.
And what about that trackpad? It’s one of the largest haptic trackpads you’ll find on a business laptop.
This just makes it a lot easier to navigate the system and a huge help with the editing apps we were using.
The HP EliteBook Ultra G1i is running Windows 11 Pro and includes Copilot+ which opens a huge range of AI features to improve your creativity and productivity.
These features include numerous writing tools including summarising documents and rewriting.
It’s also possible to create images and view live captions on a video call.
HP is also contributed to the AI feature set with its AI Companion which can keep an eye on the system and adjust things based on how you work and what you’re working on.
For your video calls the built in 9MP camera allows you to look your best while offering a number of options with the Poly Camera Pro whether you’re just a participant in the call or doing the presentation yourself.
It has auto framing and a choice of backgrounds along a range of other presenter overlays.
On the audio side there are quad stereo speakers along with dual microphones that offer AI noise reduction.
And they offer surprising quality as well when watching content or YouTube.
Under the hood is the Intel Core Ultra 7 processor and the model we reviewed had 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD storage.
Performance wise, the laptop easily handled our day-to-day tasks including video calls, emails and browsing.
It also offered effortless photo editing and could easily get through solid video editing as well but we found the screen on the smaller side to do longer video edits.
In a business environment or if deployed from an IT department, the HP EliteBook Ultra G1i can easily run high-level proprietary software.
This laptop is not built for games although it can handle even the more robust titles.
But in terms of meeting the needs of a business user or prosumer, there will be no issues.
Also onboard is HP Wolf security for business which offers hardware-enforced security at every level.
HP quotes the battery life of the HP EliteBook Ultra G1i at around 20 hours which lined up with our usage which easily got us through almost two full days of work before we had to plug it in.
The HP EliteBook Ultra G1i is available now and is priced from $3,870.
VERDICT
The HP EliteBook Ultra G1i is a sleek and light laptop that offers impressive power and performance for the business user or prosumer. It provides an exceptional experience whether you’re using it for work or play.
