HP Omnibook 5: Ultrabook prowess, all-day battery life

The HP Omnibook 5 is a lightweight ultrabook that stands in as a formidable contender to the XPS and Macbook Air. While it doesn’t bring anything groundbreaking to HP’s Omnibook series, it fits in the portfolio well, as a strong entry-level laptop for anyone, from students to business executives.

The Specs

The Omnibook 5 is powered by an updated tier of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Plus, which gives it decent processing power and AI chops, while delivering battery life above what’s expected of a laptop so thin and light.

The version we received from HP for review has 1TB of SSD Storage, 32GB of RAM, and a 14-inch 2K (non-touch) display. It’s priced at $899 from HP, although you can find it on sale at retailers like Amazon and Best Buy as well.

Design

The Omnibook 5 has a sleek, all metal aluminum build with soft keys for the QWERTY keyboard, and a fingerprints sensor embedded into the power button that enables Windows Hello security on the system.

Thd display is surrounded by narrow bezels, with a camera shutter that can cover the 1080p HD lens at the top of the lid.

Closing the laptop, you’re greeted with a shiny, metallic HP logo with the classic design. It’s small fries, but a design quirk that I feel HP missed out on, as the newer HP logo would have made this laptop design perfect (in my opinion).

Windows on ARM<Apple Silicon

Windows devices running Snapdragon processors lean on an mobile-first architecture that focuses on power efficiency over raw power and computation grunt. There aren’t many downside to this, as the latest smartphones and tablets are as powerful as laptops and desktops, plus the more modernized standards make them more suitable for the embedded NPUs needed to power the LLMs that power AI. The Snapdragon X Plus, with an NPUs equipped with 30 TOPs of power and a dedicated AI engine, does just that. HP also has a software suite of AI tools to enhance your experience, it’s AI companion app is worthy of a notable mention.

While Windows on ARM processors have come a long way, and about 90% of commerical software works on the platform – the 10% that doesn’t could be a deal breaker for some. 50% of my game collection on Steam or Xbox installed but wouldn’t launch. Those who work in Visual Design or Music Production and gamers might need to look elsewhere, as half of the Adobe Creative Suite won’t install – nor does some DAWs like Ableton Live have compatible versions for Windows on ARM devices. Make sure the software you use runs on ARM, as some may still require an Intel or AMD x86 system.

Conclusion

The Omnibook 5 is an awesome laptop, that offers cutting edge specs and top-notch build. It doesn’t offer anything unique to the Omnibook series, but converges the best features from the more expensive models in the lineup in a more streamlined package for the everyday user. You won’t be disappointed.

We’ll be revisiting this review in two weeks, and updating it over the course of 90 days.