HP Omnibook Ultra laptop review

HP OmniBook Ultra: small but power-packed

January 28, 2025

Summary

HP OmniBook Ultra

PAT PILCHER put HP’s new ultra-portable laptop to the test and found that in every way that mattered the Omnibook Ultra held its own with the heavy hitters.

From $3999

HP Omnibook Ultra laptop reviewUltra-portable PCs are usually an exercise in compromise. Reducing their size and weight usually involves a corresponding reduction of their specs –  at least until now. With AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 processors offering more grunt than ever, HP’s OmniBook Ultra looks to be a great example of this trend. But is it?

It’s a sleek wee beastie. Weighing in at a mere 1.527kg, it’s sufficiently light that chucking it into a laptop or carry-on travel bag is no big ask. The Omnibook Ultra’s understated gunmetal grey design lends it a whiff of sophistication, hinting at HP’s focus on delivering an upmarket yet super portable notebook. Opening it up reveals a light blue power button that handily does double duty as a fingerprint reader. Its keyboard is flanked by speaker grilles on both sides, and its keys are done out in a dark grey finish.

HP Omnibook Ultra laptop reviewThe audio cranked out was okay, but if you like bass and clean sounds at decent volume levels it’s best to invest in a good pair of headphones or external speakers. To finish the design ensemble, the display sits under a slab of glossy glass, with the vertical bezels on either side as minimal as possible.

The OmniBook Ultra has two Thunderbolt 4 ports on its right-hand side, a 3.5mm jack and a rather curious USB-A port arrangement on its left-hand side: the USB-A port has a weird cover that seems destined to catch on the cruft in your laptop bag and break. This wee cover also seems largely unnecessary. Rounding out the physical connectivity options is support for the shiny new, super-fast Wi-Fi 7 standard and Bluetooth, adding a healthy dollop of future-proofing.

HP Omnibook Ultra laptop reviewUnder the hood, it has an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 processor. This packs four Zen 5 cores and eight Zen 5c cores and delivers solid performance, being able to turbo boost up to a zippy 5.1 GHz from an already fast 3.3 GHz. The review unit came with 32GB of LPDDR5x-7500 RAM and a 1TB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD. Considering its ultra-portable form factor, it shone in bench testing.

Firing up Geekbench 6 saw the OmniBook Ultra scoring a healthy 2,848 for single-core and 14,837 multi-core performance, making it a solid performer despite its pint-sized form factor. Equally impressive is the Ryzen AI 9 HX’s AI performance chops. Its NPU (Nural Processing Unit) offers an outstanding 55 TOPS, well over Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC certification requirements. In use, this translated into zippy Copilot response times, greatly adding to the effortless feel when using the OmniBook Ultra, which seemed to barely break a sweat, no matter what I threw at it.

HP Omnibook Ultra laptop reviewHP has bucked the OLED trend, choosing to kit out the OmniBook with an old-school IPS LCD display instead. That said, it delivered bright and vivid colours in a 16:10 aspect ratio at a crispy 2240 x 1400 resolution. Like most Windows notebooks, the Omnibook’s display also supports touch input. Keeping a cleaning cloth in your laptop bag is probably a good idea unless you’re a fan of on-screen smudges and fingerprints.

Unplugging the Omnibook from its bundled power adaptor and running a looped HD YouTube video test saw it running for just shy of 13 hours before it demanded quality time with mains power. This isn’t too shabby at all, especially given the performance on offer.

Priced from $3999, HP’s OmniBook Ultra offers solid performance and is a highly capable ultrabook with surprisingly few compromises. Its compact, lightweight design, powerful specs and decent battery life make it a solid option for anyone needing to compute on the move.

https://www.hp.com/nz-en/shop/hp-omnibook-ultra-laptop-14-fd0000au-ay6u6pa.html

 

Pat has been talking about tech on TV, radio and print for over 20 years, having served time as a TV tech guy and currently penning reviews for Witchdoctor. He loves nothing more than rolling his sleeves up and playing with shiny gadgets.

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