HP Omnibook X review: Snapdragon does most of the heavy lifting

HP has jumped on the AI bandwagon, offering up the new Omnibook X powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, which boasts an NPU capable of 45 TOPS. HP packages it all in a stylish design and has slapped a modest premium onto it, with the HP Omnibook X sitting at a little over $1,000.

But with plenty of competition both from other Snapdragon-powered laptops like the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge and Ryzen-powered Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, the HP Omnibook X is squaring up against competitors that it may not have what it takes to knock down, especially with so many areas where HP seems to have kept things basic. 

Further reading: Best laptops 2024: Premium, budget, gaming, 2-in-1s, and more

HP Omnibook X: Specs and features

The HP Omnibook X doesn’t come with many configuration options. It starts out at $1,149, offering up a Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 CPU with 16GB of fast LPDDR5x memory and 512GB of storage. At the time of writing, the only hardware upgrade available was a doubling of storage for $100 or bumping it to 2TB for $200. That said, buying a pre-configured model with 1TB of storage is a more reasonable $50 price increase instead.

HP offers a meteor silver (a dark gray) color as a default, though a white option is available for $10 more. Windows 11 Pro is also available as an upgrade for $69 extra. The model we tested just has the 1TB storage upgrade, coming in at $1,199. 

• CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100
• Memory: 16GB LPDDR5x
• Graphics/GPU: Qualcomm Adreno integrated graphics
• Display: 14-inch 2240×1400 IPS Touchscreen
• Storage: 1TB PCIe Gen4 SSD
• Webcam: 5MP
• Connectivity: 1x USB4, 1x USB-C 10Gbps with Power Delivery and DisplayPort Alternate Mode, 1x USB-A 10Gbps, 1x 3.5mm combo audio
• Networking: WiFi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
• Biometrics: Windows Hello facial recognition
• Battery capacity: 59 watt-hours
• Dimensions: 12.32 x 8.8 x 0.56 inches
• Weight: 2.95 pounds
• MSRP: $1,199 as-tested ($1,149 base)

HP Omnibook X: Design and build quality

IDG / Mark Knapp

IDG / Mark Knapp

IDG / Mark Knapp

The HP Omnibook X isn’t a huge departure from HP’s other recent laptops. It bears a striking resemblance to the latest HP Envy x360 14, albeit without the 360-degree hinge. It boasts an aluminum enclosure in a dusky gray (or a white colorway), and it feels relatively robust with little keyboard deck flex and little bending to the display.

The keyboard is a deeper gray and, contrasting from other HP systems, features yet another shade of gray for the function row and a slate blue for the power button. It’s an interesting playfulness for key color that I’m not mad at. 

Visually, it offers much of the polish of a MacBook in most areas except the display. There may not have been a way around it, as the spacing around the keyboard and trackpad is already fairly tight, but the display has rather sizable bezels at the top and bottom that are not so distracting but lend an unevenness to the look. The sharp corners at the top of the display also don’t meld well with the smooth corners of the lid. 

This little fumble may be worth overlooking though, as the layout of the base is quite satisfactory. The keyboard isn’t cramped and as much as I’d love to see HP’s little navigation column at the right edge of the keyboard, it’s enough that HP didn’t try shrinking the right shift key or some other such heinous design move.

The trackpad below the keyboard is reasonably large, and blends well with the looks of the system. The laptop is nice and slim, both above and below, measuring just over a half-inch thick and weighing a hair under 3 pounds.

Above the display, HP has fitted a 5MP webcam, which includes a physical privacy shutter. The shutter uses black and white diagonal lines for visibility, but I find this can be hard to distinguish from simple glare on the glass cover — a red cover would have been more prominent. 

The HP Omnibook X offers a wide grille for pulling in fresh air beneath the system, and it appears to have a fairly effective little exhaust system. While the exhaust vent faces the screen, HP has sculpted the hinge in such a way that it doesn’t so much obstruct the vents as it does channel them.

When the display is open, the air will hit this angled guide and be vented up across the display. If the display is closed, the air will be directed downward. The hinge itself could be somewhat improved though, as it has a propensity for wiggling after it’s been adjusted. 

The display lid on the HP Omnibook X is only lightly adorned by a glossy HP logo, though there’s also a long antenna line running along the top edge of it as well. The underside of the laptop has similarly sparse features with one large rubber foot at the rear, two small rubber feet in the front, and two small speakers in front of the smaller feet.

HP Omnibook X: Keyboard, trackpad

IDG / Mark Knapp

IDG / Mark Knapp

IDG / Mark Knapp

The HP Omnibook X keyboard is good but not exceptional. It has flat, almost rounded, keycaps with respectable stabilization, but the flipside of that stability is a surprising stiffness. Combined with a short travel, I’ve found it far too easy to under-press a key and end up with a missed stroke, especially when hitting the same key twice in a row. This either calls for much firmer taps which can get tiring, or a slower, more deliberate method of typing.

I was able to comfortably type along at about 100 words per minute with 95 percent accuracy, and once hit 124 words per minute with 99 percent accuracy, but that was the exception. As a Copilot+ PC, the HP Omnibook X also opts for a Copilot button instead of a Right Control key, a change from the long-standing layout that I still find inconvenient for many keyboard shortcuts.

There’s also some weirdness around alternative functions on the keyboard. By pressing Fn+Left Shift on the keyboard, you can activate a Fn Lock (which makes the secondary function of keys the default), but this seems to only apply to F1-F12 keys. Since the page navigation controls (Home, End, etc) are made secondaries on the arrow keys, there becomes no way to use them alongside the Shift key, making a nuisance of certain types of text selection. 

The trackpad sits perfectly centered below the keyboard, making it comfortably accessible to either hand. It’s a decent size, plenty for mousing around the whole screen and multi-finger gestures. It’s satisfyingly smooth, responds well to taps, and it has a gentle hardware click that’s fairly easy to rely on, though it could use a little more force returning to its starting position as I find I occasionally fail to let it up enough to double-click. 

HP Omnibook X: Display, audio

IDG / Mark Knapp

IDG / Mark Knapp

IDG / Mark Knapp

While the HP Omnibook X might be among the cheaper options in this first fleet of Qualcomm-powered ultrabooks, it’s still over $1,000 and I’d hope for it to better reflect that. Alas, the display doesn’t.

The HP Omnibook X display offers an unusual 2240 x 1400 resolution, but it is respectably sharp on a 14-inch display. That’s about where its commendable quality ends. It’s not bad, but it fails to cover even 100 percent of the sRGB color space, hitting just 96 percent instead.

Peak brightness reaches just 294.2 nits. With a glossy, touchscreen display, you’re going to be seeing considerable smears and glare whenever you use this laptop in bright environments and the screen brightness simply won’t be enough to conquer this. 

The display does have a bump in contrast over typical IPS panels, hitting 1380:1, but that’s not enough to make it a joy to watch content on. When there’s no shortage of stunning OLED panels on laptops costing less, the HP Omnibook X feels like it skimped. A matte finish on the display would have gone a long way toward making the screen more practical. 

The speaker system is also nothing to write home about. The volume the speakers manage is modest. In a quiet room, it’ll do for solo listening, but it can overcome loud noise. The sound isn’t very full either with a considerable lack of bass. I’d definitely hope for better from a $1,000+ laptop. 

HP Omnibook X: Webcam, microphone, biometrics

The webcam on the HP Omnibook X is a good looker, but it’s got some bugs to work out. Sharpness is very good, and there’s a depth of field to the visuals that adds a certain quality to the footage many webcams lack. It even manages an impressive dynamic range, even if it somewhat over-brightens my face. 

The microphone is also quite good at picking up my voice, though it also includes quite a bit of background noise. However, your ability to take advantage of the webcam may be impacted to a considerable degree by the behavior of the laptop.

Recording a few sample clips in the default Camera app, I couldn’t believe how much the camera failed to include in the final file. One clip over 15 seconds long ended up as a file barely over a second that didn’t include practically any of what I recorded. In fact, many clips recorded only managed to include the first second or so. This occurred on a second review unit as well. Quite a few clips end up with sputtering baked right into the file, and some failed entirely to record audio.

It’s hard to nail down whether this is an issue with the system hardware or with the Windows Camera app’s handling of the webcam. On the plus side, the camera at least reliably works a quick Windows Hello sign-in method. 

HP Omnibook X: Connectivity

IDG / Mark Knapp

IDG / Mark Knapp

IDG / Mark Knapp

The HP Omnibook X isn’t giving you a lot, but it’s better than some ultrabooks. Despite the system’s slim design, HP still found its way to including a USB-A port with a flexible jaw that lets the port shrink when not in use. It’s a trick HP’s employed for quite a few years, and it’s effective.

That USB-A port is flanked by a 3.5mm headset jack while the opposite side of the laptop offers two USB-C ports. Disappointingly, only one of these is a 40Gbps USB4 port while the other is a 10Gbps port, albeit still one that provides charging and DisplayPort capabilities.

My disappointment is still somewhat tempered by the fact USB4 was included at all, as many laptops in the last year have been neglecting the new port.

Wireless connectivity is respectable enough with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, effectively giving you the latest and greatest. In my testing, there wasn’t any trouble with the technology. 

HP Omnibook X: Performance

Where performance is concerned, the HP Omnibook X isn’t going to be a top dog. It’s simply not geared up to be. Even among the new brood of Qualcomm-powered laptops, it’s not running one of the higher-end chips. Where it has a Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100, the Dell XPS 13 (9345) has a Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 and the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge has a X1E-84-100, with both of those chips offering a dual-core frequency boost that’s unavailable to the HP Omnibook X.

The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge’s processor even gets an elevated maximum multi-core frequency of 3.8GHz, up from the 3.4GHz of the HP Omnibook X and even the Dell XPS 13 9345. These Snapdragon laptops aren’t alone on the market though, and they have worthy Intel- and AMD-powered systems to compete with, like the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED with a Ryzen 7 8840HS processor and the Dell XPS 13 9340, which runs on an Intel core Ultra 7 155H instead of the Snapdragon chip in the XPS 13 9345.

Despite running the lower-end chip, the HP Omnibook X isn’t slacking. Its multi-core speeds in Cinebench R23 actually keep up shockingly well with those of its two Snapdragon-powered competitors.

The HP Omnibook X’s ability to keep up with the higher-end chips in the XPS 13 9345 and Samsung laptop is surprising, as the Cinebench R23 multi-core test is fairly bursty, and Samsung especially should have benefitted from its higher multi-core clock speeds.

The others differentiate themselves some in Cinebench R24, with its lengthier runtime giving them some room to get distance from the HP Omnibook X

In any case, the Cinebench R23 score of the HP Omnibook X is a solid result, though still not quite on par with the Intel Core 7 Ultra 155H in the XPS 13, which comes out roughly 15 percent ahead. It’s also no match for the Ryzen 7 8840HS in the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, which leads it by well over 30 percent. 

Graphics also aren’t the strong suit of the HP Omnibook X and its Adreno GPU. In Time Spy, it mustered just 1,809 points, lagging slightly behind the XPS 13 9345 and well behind the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge. To put that in perspective, that’s slightly worse than the basic Intel Graphics in the $749 Acer Aspire Vero 16 AV16-51P-5641 I reviewed earlier this year. This performance also falls far behind the Intel Arc Graphics and AMD Radeon 780M found in the XPS 13 9340 and Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, respectively. 

Beyond the benchmarks, the HP Omnibook X also showed some performance issues. On a regular basis — sporadically any time I use the HP Omnibook X for a couple hours — the system runs into a sort of graphical hitch while playing a YouTube video in one window and doing anything else in a second window. This sees both browser windows visually freeze completely. Quickly minimizing the windows and then pulling them back up gets past this, but it’s also something that shouldn’t be happening in the first place.

Even when it’s not freezing completely, it exhibits some noticeable issues. For instance, scrolling in one window can stutter while a video plays in the other but immediately smooths out when the video is paused. This is likely the graphics at play, with integrated graphics and shared memory a frequent culprit for such hitches. 

The performance levels coming from the HP Omnibook X don’t make a strong case for it and the Snapdragon X Elite chip inside. While it’s worth noting that some tasks have to run through emulation and can therefore take a performance hit, the reality is that it may be some time before a majority of programs have native ARM versions, and users’ experiences will also often rely on the performance of these chips running apps through emulation layers. 

HP Omnibook X: Battery life

The HP Omnibook X claws back some of its lost dignity in battery life, where it’s a solid leader against most of its competition here. Even though its display has to be nearly maxed out (to 96 percent) just to hit our brightness range for testing (250-260 nits), it still can chug along. In our 4K video playback test, the HP Omnibook X ran for almost 18 hours on average. If we allowed the laptop to adjust brightness based on the content it’s displaying, the battery life can stretch to over 26 hours. 

That roughly 18-hour runtime gives the HP Omnibook X a leg up over both Dell XPS 13 models, beating both by over 2 hours. It also gets out slightly ahead of the Asus ZenBook 14 OLED, though only by a hair over one hour. Still, the HP Omnibook X proved no match for the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge, which may have benefitted from its ever-so-slightly bigger battery and the power savings OLED can have for the black letterboxing that flanks our test video.

Video playback isn’t the end of the story. The HP Omnibook X continues to prove long-lasting active workloads as well. Browsing the web, watching videos, and working on assignments with a dozen or more tabs open, I found the HP Omnibook X able to plug along losing just 8 percent of charge per hour, which puts it on track to run for over 12 hours on a charge. This was with the display still set to between 250 and 260 nits. This said, it’s worth noting that the testing was done with the ARM version of Chrome.

When I worked in the x86 version of Chrome, the battery drained far quicker, with 90 minutes of work draining the battery by nearly a quarter and putting the HP Omnibook X on track for barely a six hour runtime. This is a far less promising result and could pose problems if you’re frequently working in x86 programs and not ARM-native ones.

Finally, the HP Omnibook X isn’t immune to one of the big annoyances for Windows laptops. After going to sleep, it can wake itself right back up even with the lid closed. And if you don’t have an aggressive sleep timer, it might sit in a backpack or lie on a desk just burning away that great battery life. 

HP Omnibook X: Conclusion

The HP Omnibook X is a fine laptop, offering respectable performance and excellent battery life. It’s built reasonably well and looks nice enough, but it just feels like there are too many areas where it’s falling short for a laptop that costs over $1,000.

The display is one of its biggest weaknesses and a poor choice to put on such an expensive laptop. It only seems to offer a modest bump in sharpness and a touchscreen to set itself apart from the display on some much cheaper laptops.

The keyboard is fine, but could certainly be better. And even though the new Snapdragon processor might be the new hotness, it’s not showing an outright performance or battery-life advantage over other systems out there, and it can even shoot itself in the foot if users aren’t careful about getting the ARM version of programs.

To put it simply, the HP Omnibook X is a fine machine, but it has to compete with excellent ones like the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, which costs only $849 as tested. It might not have the same NPU, but I haven’t had much luck getting Windows Copilot to do anything useful or impressively fast with the HP Omnibook X’s 45 TOPS anyway.