- RATING
HP OmniBook Ultra is superb all-rounder laptop for that customer who wants to work hard and play hard and be entertained. It can certainly deliver in all those areas with ease with performance to satisfy even the most demanding users.
HP’s OmniBook Ultra 14 is a lot of laptop. It’s capable and powerful and can meet all your PC needs while being an excellent tool for AI to improve your efficiency and creativity.
This is the latest consumer PC laptop offering from HP and they’ve taken all their learnings over the years of releasing compelling products and shaped it beautifully into the OmniBook Ultra.
Design-wise the OmniBook Ultra is slick. It is thin (10.7mm) and light (1.28kg) and made of forge-stamped aluminium, which helps keep down the weight and increase the strength so it can easily handle day-to-day usage on the move.
HP has put the laptop through 20 military standard tests so don’t think that its light and thin chassis isn’t up to the task.
It has a matte finish with glossy edges.
For the period we were using it as our daily driver it did feel thinner and lighter than our go to 14-inch MacBook Pro.
And it was so light we’d forget we had it in our backpack – in fact I had to check several times that I’d remembered to pack it.
The first thing that catches your eye is the stunning 3K OLED touchscreen which has remarkable brightness and accurate colour thanks to a colour gamut that covers 100 per cent of DCI-P3.
It’s a brilliant workspace that you won’t tire of looking at.
It has up to 1,100 nits peak brightness and a 120 Hz refresh rate.
The full-sized keyboard has nice-sized keys with decent travel to make typing easy and quiet.
But what you also get is a massive trackpad offers an easy way to navigate interact with the system.
Also onboard is a 5MP webcam, which can be used to unlock your computer with Windows Hello facial recognition.
Naturally it’s an ideal tool for any video conferencing.
Video quality through this camera is good, not great and It could use some finessing in terms of looking your best for presentations and video calls.
And for added peace of mind there is a shutter so you can physically cover the camera when not in use.
The device is powered by the Intel Core Ultra X9 Series 3 processor which means it not only provides solid performance but it can also easily handle demanding AI workloads on device.
On the performance side the HP OmniBook Ultra certainly delivered but we appreciate the fact that the laptop can do a lot more for power users because our workflow didn’t really challenge it too much.
The unit we received for review had a 1TB solid-state drive with 32GB of LPDDR5x SDRAM and was running Windows 11.
But let’s just say if you are running high-end applications and even the latest games, it is more than up to the task.
It also has a vapour chamber on board to keep things cool if you are pushing the unit to its limit.
The chip comes with Intel’s ARC B390 GPU which will delight gamers demanding better graphics performance that they would receive on a generic Intel CPU.
The 70Wh battery was also one of its best features, running for up to 20 hours before we needed to reach for the charger.
For us that was nearly two full workdays.
In terms of connectivity there is a USB-C port and a headphone jack on the left edge. And two other USB-C ports on the right.
It would have been nice to see an HDMI port or perhaps even a memory card slot but the design couldn’t accommodate it.
The HP OmniBook Ultra that we reviewed is available now and is priced at $3,499.
VERDICT
HP OmniBook Ultra is superb all-rounder laptop for that customer who wants to work hard and play hard and be entertained. It can certainly deliver in all those areas with ease with performance to satisfy even the most demanding users.
