Introduction

The HP Omnibook X 14 takes the efficiency and modest power yield from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip, and bungs into a respectable 14-inch chassis.

It aims to provide another competitor in the litany of similarly small laptops with the processor inside and give HP a foothold in this particular sector that’s already choc-full of great options such as the Acer Swift 14 AI and Dell XPS 13 (2024).

The spec sheet here is quite compelling, too, with a 14-inch 2.2K IPS touchscreen display, as well as 16GB of RAM, a capacious 1TB SSD, and solid battery life. Priced at $1049.99/£1249.99, it’s also competitive against those key rivals.

I’ve been testing this option for the last couple of weeks to see how it performs against its fierce competition.

Design and Keyboard

• Decent build quality
• Meagre port selection
• Responsive keyboard and trackpad

The Omnibook X 14 carries a similar look and feel to the Omnibook Ultra 14, with a solid metal chassis that feels durable and adds a touch of quality. Bezels around the screen are on the larger side, though, perhaps hindering a cutting-edge feel against key rivals.

Its compact 14-inch screen means the overall frame is quite small too, making this an easy laptop to sling into a bag on your travels. At 1.3kg, it’s also reasonably light for a laptop in its size class, helping its portability.

Where this Omnibook X 14 has inherited an unwanted trait from its Ultra brother is with its port selection. It’s best described as adequate, totalling two USB-C on the left, and a USB-A and 3.5mm headphone jack on the right.

The USB-A port has the same port cover as an Ethernet port, which is a bit of an odd choice, and can make it a tad difficult to spot at first glance.

Being a more compact laptop means this laptop has a suitably smaller keyboard. It comes with a 65% layout of sorts, adding in a function row and arrow keys to its alphanumeric set. The key travel is snappy and short, making it quite a tactile keyboard. There is also some solid white backlighting for after-dark working.

The trackpad here is a decent size too, giving your fingers solid real estate for navigation, It also has tactile buttons and accurate tracking.

Display and Sound

• Solid resolution IPS screen with good colours
• Brightness is okay, with deeper blacks and decent dynamic range
• Speakers aren’t the strongest

As with the Windows-powered Ultra model, the Omnibook X 14 oddly eschews the customary OLED display fitted to these more premium ultrabooks in favour of a more standard 14-inch 2240×1400, or 2.2K resolution, 60Hz IPS touchscreen display. This gives you decent detail across this slightly smaller screen size with decent responsiveness.

For day-to-day use and productivity tasks, I had few issues with it, especially with its excellent colour accuracy. There’s full 100% coverage of the mainstream sRGB colour space, while the more specialist Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 gamuts are both at 79%, meaning this panel falls just short of a basic recommendation for any more colour-sensitive workloads.

This is also a 16:10 aspect ratio option to provide that little bit more vertical space to make it well-suited for modern workloads.

The 284 nits of peak brightness is okay for indoor use, although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend you take the Omnibook X 14 outdoors. Likewise, the 1710:1 contrast ratio and 0.08 black level gives this IPS screen some solid dynamic range and blacks, although it isn’t preferable to the inky blacks and immense contrast afforded by OLED screens available on a lot of ultrabooks up and down the price ladder.

The downwards-firing speakers leave a lot to be desired, though, with audio that’s fine for casual listening, but being quite thin and lacking substance means it isn’t suitable for anything more.

Performance

• Zippy performance from its Snapdragon X Elite SoC
• Lacking in graphical horsepower for more intensive workloads
• Capacious, but quite slow SSD

The Omnibook X 14 joins the slew of modern Windows ultrabooks opting for the Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC, complete with 12 cores and 12 threads that make it increasingly well-suited to basic computing needs and with some potency for more intensive tasks where warranted.

This is backed up not only by its respectable scores in the likes of Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 against key rivals from Microsoft and Acer, but also in zippy day-to-day tasks for my workloads, including writing up thousands of words in Google Docs and a light bit of photo editing in Adobe Photoshop. The Omnibook X 14 took it like a champ.

The only element where this laptop falls down, as with every other Snapdragon-powered Windows machine, is with its graphical horsepower.

The Adreno integrated graphics aren’t powerful enough for more than very light gaming, while more intensive tasks such as video editing are better-suited to more potent laptops such as the Apple MacBook Air M3 and Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro.

The 16GB of RAM here provides some headroom for multitasking and intensive tasks, while the 1TB SSD is capacious for lots of apps and local files. As much as it’s a solid SSD in terms of drive space, it is lacking in speed, with respective reads and writes of 3353.45MB/s and 2946.45MB/s. They pale in comparison to those with other ultrabooks I’ve tested.

Software

• Proper Windows 11 installed
• Some pre-installed HPC apps
• Also comes with usual Copilot+ PC features

The Omnibook X14 comes running Windows 11, and with a range of software pre-installed, including McAfee antivirus, as is typical with some of these ultrabooks.

It also comes with a range of HP-specific software, HP’s AI Companion app, which is pinned to the taskbar on initial setup and provides a means of accessing HP’s AI assistant things, such as to write copy in a specific style or to enable features such as noise reduction and auto framing for conferencing.

Elsewhere, this is also a Copilot+ PC and has enough AI power to warrant the inclusion of Microsoft’s own tools. Chief among these is the addition of the Copilot assistant which you can ask questions and to undertake tasks, if you so wish.

In addition, there is also generative AI functionality baked into the Photos and Paint apps, if you want it. The most useful set of AI tools with the Omnibook X 14 is the Windows Studio effects for the webcam, which provides convenient means of auto framing, background blur and even for making sure you maintain eye contact.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 16 hours and 59 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for two working days

HP quotes the Omnibook X 14 to last for up to 26 hours on a charge, which may seem quite high at first glance for its modest 59Whr-capacity cell. However, it’s worth noting that we have seen some immense efficiency from these new Arm-based Windows machines in the past, such as the 22 hours afforded by the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 and 20.5 hours from Acer’s Swift 14 AI.

In the PCMark 10 video loop test with brightness at the requisite 150 nits, the Omnibook X 14 managed to last for a minute short of 17 hours. That’s still a fantastic result, easily giving you two working days away from the mains, although falls short of HP’s own claims. It is competitive against key rivals, though.

The 65W charging brick isn’t as fast to charge this laptop as the competition, though, with half charge taking an hour, and a full zero to 100 percent run going just over two hours at 124 minutes.

Should you buy it?

FAQs