HP OmniBook X 14 Review: A Powerful, Long-Lasting Laptop With Cutting-Edge AI Features

A Powerful, Long-Lasting Laptop With Cutting-Edge AI Features

The HP OmniBook X 14 is HP's first generation of consumer-facing laptops with the Snapdragon chip, a mid-range Copilot+ PC without any earthshaking features but an impressive battery and improved performance in an ultraportable form factor.

Performance and Design

The OmniBook X 14 comes with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, but can be upgraded to 1TB of storage. The Snapdragon X Elite's strong performance is evident in ways consumers will care about: apps open and close quickly, webpages spring to life instantly, and the device has no problem switching between different tasks without missing a beat.

The 14-inch touchscreen display is fine, but it's not an OLED, and it's not very bright. The color gamut is respectable, but it taps out at 300 nits of brightness and a 60Hz refresh rate.

The laptop's form factor is surprisingly light and thin, at just 2.97 pounds, and comes in either a neutral chrome color or a matte ceramic white model, which is sharp-looking and smudge-resistant.

Connectivity is fine, with two USB-C Thunderbolt ports, a USB-A port, and 3.5mm headphone jack. There's no SD card slot, which, paired with a slightly better display, would have gone a long way toward making this laptop a little more premium. On that note, the keyboard isn't high-end, but it is satisfying and functional, smudge-resistant, and has a nice key travel distance with attractive backlighting.

The Battery is the Star of the Show

The device's 5MP webcam is also quite nice and contributes to its use case as a portable workstation for digital nomads or hybrid professionals tethered to daily videoconferencing.

Further supporting that fact is HP's AI-powered Poly Camera Pro software, which comes loaded on the OmniBook with a wide range of templates and quality-of-life settings for the webcam, including spotlighting, subtle appearance touch ups, background blurring, and a digital business card overlay feature that displays your name and contact information in a variety of designs.

Simply put, the battery on this thing is impressive. HP states that the 59Wh battery on the OmniBook X 14 gets up to 26 hours of battery life, and I found this to be more or less accurate.

The AI in the Snapdragon chips adjusts the power supply to the processor based on current needs, dropping to virtually zero when the device is off or asleep. In practice, the goal behind this is for the laptop to simply not lose juice when it's not in use.

While using the laptop, the battery life is also quite good. In fact, during my two weeks of using the OmniBook, I rarely even thought about the battery, just plugging it in when it was convenient to do so, instead of being prompted to by Windows.

Even better, I got almost identical results when benchmarking plugged into power versus while running on battery. This means performance doesn't take a dip if you don't have access to an outlet, sealing the deal as a solid laptop for ultra-mobile remote workers. Keep in mind that I got these results only after several back-to-back Windows updates, including a BIOS update, that rolled out during testing.

Windows on ARM: A Work in Progress

Performance and physical specs aside, the OmniBook X 14 is part of the first generation of Snapdragon X laptops, which operates on ARM compared to any Windows machine on x86. This means that certain programs don't run well yet, and some don't run at all, an important factor to consider.

There are going to be hiccups as developers optimize and make their programs compatible, and even apps that are compatible with Windows on ARM aren't fully optimized. When I first fired up DaVinci Resolve on the OmniBook, it was laggy. After a Windows update a few days later, performance improved.

Gaming is not fully supported by Windows on ARM yet, either. Many titles don't work, and if they do, the performance is subpar. The OmniBook isn't a gaming laptop, so I wouldn't be trying to run games on this machine anyway, but right now we don't have much of a choice either way.

This gets to the meat of the issue here. Yes, the CPU is fast and efficient, and the NPU on these processors runs AI-related tasks better than anything else on the market, but the chips are held back by Windows' functionality (at least for now), and this tension between the two will be at the root cause of a lot of issues until the growing pains subside.