Pros
-
Sturdy, sleek construction -
Lots of power -
Decent battery life
Cons
-
Quite heavy for a laptop of its size -
Meagre port selection -
Screen is unremarkable against key rivals
Key Features
-
AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 inside:
The Omnibook Ultra 14 comes with one of AMD’s more powerful APUs inside for especially speedy performance. -
14-inch 2.2K IPS screen:
It also comes with a solid touch-enabled IPS screen, complete with a good resolution for decent detail. -
68Whr battery:
The Omnibook Ultra 14 also has quite a large battery inside to allow for up to two days of working away from the mains.
Introduction
The HP Omnibook Ultra 14 seeks to provide a mid-sized and reasonably priced Windows ultrabook complete with lots of power.
It comes with one of AMD’s powerful Ryzen 9 AI 365 chips inside, as well as a high-res 2.2K IPS screen, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and a larger 68Whr battery. For the £1299/$1349.99 asking price, that’s not a bad spec sheet, considering the premium attached to key rivals such as the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro and the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition.
I’ve been testing the Omnibook Ultra 14 for the last few weeks to see how well it fares in what is quite a competitive sector in the laptop market and to see if HP’s choice makes for one of the best ultrabooks we’ve tested.
Design and Keyboard
- Solid, if a tad generic, chassis
- Meagre port selection
- Snappy keyboard and larger trackpad
The Omnibook Ultra 14 is a sleek laptop with a silver metal chassis that echoes its premium price tag which also feels solid. It feels a tad generic against the innovative look and feel of models from elsewhere, such as the Asus Zenbook S 14 OLED, but nonetheless gets the job done.
While the Omnibook Ultra 14’s silver, angular chassis provides it with a modern feel, this is slightly let down by its thicker bezels around the 14-inch screen. I feel as if they could have maximised the space a little more here and gotten an even better overall aesthetic.
Where HP has skimped out against the competition is with this laptop’s port selection. The right side may feature a pair of Thunderbolt 4-capable USB-C ports, but that’s about as exciting as it gets. The left side gives you a 3.5mm headphone jack and a USB-A port, albeit one that’s hidden behind a port cover as you’d find an Ethernet jack.
Elsewhere, you get a compact keyboard layout with large legends, complete with arrow keys and a handy function row. It may not have the crispness of modern MacBook Air keyboards for instance, but it goes for a shorter, snappier travel that’s easy to get up to speed with. It is also backlit with a crisp white backlight for after-dark working.
For a laptop with a more compact keyboard tray, the trackpad is on the bigger side, giving your fingers plenty of real estate. It’s a reasonably responsive trackpad too, with solid actuation.
Display and Sound
- Solid detail and black level
- Decent colour accuracy
- Speakers feel quite thin
As with the recent Acer Swift 14 AI, the Omnibook Ultra 14 perhaps springs a bit of a surprise with its display, with HP opting to go for a 2.2K resolution, or 2240×1400, IPS screen with a 60Hz refresh rate. Against the competition that traditionally come with higher refresh rate OLED screens, it feels a step in the wrong direction.
Nonetheless, the 2.2K resolution offers good detail, while the fact it’s a 16:10 aspect ratio screen makes it suitable for modern workloads where the extra vertical space is going to be appreciated. It is also touch-enabled, in spite of not being a convertible or 2-in-1 laptop with a lay-flat hinge.
The display is remarkably similar in specs to that featured on the Snapdragon X Elite-powered Omnibook X, and therefore posted quite similar results. Colour space coverage is reasonably with perfect 100% sRGB coverage making this screen well-suited for productivity workloads, although both the Adobe RGB (77%) and DCI-P3 (79%) results are under the 80 percent level that would mark them out as making this a suitable laptop for colour-sensitive tasks.
HP quotes the Omnibook Ultra 14 to have up to 400 nits of peak brightness, with my colorimeter measuring 353.2 nits peak, which is pretty good. It makes this screen suitable for both indoor and outdoor use, although there isn’t as much punch as with screens with a higher peak brightness.
A measured black level of 0.08 makes them quite deep for an IPS panel, while the 1720:1 contrast ratio also gives some solid dynamic range, although not as strong as a comparably-priced laptop with an OLED screen.
The speakers benefit from being upwards-firing, so that audio isn’t muffled when the laptop isn’t placed on a softer surface such as a bed. However, that’s about their only redeeming feature, as the speakers sound quite thin and aren’t good for much more than casual listening.
Performance
- Beefy Ryzen processor with brisk performance
- Decent integrated graphics
- Fast and capacious SSD
The Omnibook Ultra 14 features one of AMD’s powerful Ryzen AI 9 365 chips inside, the same as the MSI Prestige A16 AI+, which is a potent processor with 10 cores and 20 threads as well as a boost clock of up to 5GHz.
It’s a capable chip for productivity and more intensive workloads, as is demonstrated with its results in the likes of Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 benchmark tests, as well as in day-to-day use.
The performance on offer is also stronger in multi-core workloads over laptops with comparable Intel Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake processors in, arguably making the Omnibook Ultra 14 a stronger choice if you’re going to be undertaking a lot of intensive tasks.
The Radeon 880M integrated graphics will allow for some casual gaming and help this laptop’s suitability for beefier tasks, and mean the Omnibook Ultra 14 is a much more potent choice than both its Snapdragon X Elite-powered brother and other laptops of its kind, such as the Dell XPS 13 (2024).
This model comes with 32GB of fast DDR5 RAM to give you lots of headroom for more intensive workloads or lots of multi-tasking, while its 1TB SSD is decent in capacity and quick in its overall speeds. Respective read and write speeds of 7158.42 MB/s and 6467.55 MB/s also make it as quick as SSDs on more powerful gaming laptops I’ve tested, too.
Software
- Proper Windows 11 installed
- Some pre-installed HPC apps
- Also comes with usual Copilot+PC features
The Omnibook Ultra 14 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, most notably the HP Support Assistant which allows you to check on your system’s vitals, such as component usage, battery health and storage utilisation. There is also 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 that 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 Ultra 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.
Microsoft is still touting its controversial Recall feature with these Copilot+ PCs, and even if it isn’t on the Omninook Ultra 14 at the time of writing, it is labelled as ‘coming soon’. The idea of it is that it takes screenshots of your screen every few seconds so you can look back and remember things you’ve looked at, even if you haven’t manually bookmarked them or used the Snipping Tool to take a screenshot. Due to privacy concerns, it remains for Windows Insiders, and it seems to need some ironing out before it gets released into the wild.
Battery Life
- Lasted for 15 hours in the battery test
- Capable of lasting for two working days
The Omnibook Ultra 14 features a reasonably large 68Whr cell, which is comparable in size to its key rivals. In conjunction with the boosted endurance that the modern Ryzen AI 9 365 chip inside provides, it ended up powering this laptop to a respectable 15 hours in the PCMark 10 Modern Office test at the requisite 150 nits of brightness.
That’s a respectable result against the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro that lasted for just shy of half an hour longer than HP’s choice, while the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition managed an even stronger 22 hours on a charge. Nonetheless, this Omnibook Ultra 14 will last for around two working days on a charge before you need to go and plug it in.
With its 65W USB-C charger, it was also reasonably brisk at recharging, taking 42 minutes to go from zero to fifty percent, while a full charge took an hour and a half.
Should you buy it?
You want solid power:
The Ryzen AI 9 365 chip inside the Omnibook Ultra 14 makes it one of the brisker laptops at its price point. If you want a fair amount of power in an ultrabook, this is good contender.
You want more ports:
HP went full Apple with the meagre port selection on the Omnibook Ultra 14, offering only a basic selection. If you want more inputs, then there are plenty of other laptops that can provide it.
Final Thoughts
The HP Omnibook Ultra 14 is a good laptop with solid power, decent battery life and a reasonable display, but falls down with its meagre port selection and generic looks. It also fails to stand out against key rivals at its price point with its lack of an OLED screen, for instance.
The likes of the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro and Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition may sacrifice a little bit of power, but make up for it with sleeker looks, a much stronger selection of ports and an OLED display against the Omnibook Ultra 14. This is still a solid laptop, although it isn’t the best in its class. For more options, check out our list of the best ultrabooks we’ve tested.
Trusted Score
How we test
Every laptop we review goes through a series of uniform checks designed to gauge key factors, including build quality, performance, screen quality and battery life.
These include formal synthetic benchmarks and scripted tests, plus a series of real-world checks, such as how well it runs popular apps.
- We used as our main laptop for at least a week.
- We test the performance via both benchmark tests and real-world use.
- We test the screen with a colorimeter and real-world use.
- We test the battery with a benchmark test and real-world use.
FAQs
The HP Omnibook Ultra 14 weighs 1.57kg, making it quite heavy for a laptop of its modest size.
Test Data
| HP Omnibook Ultra 14 |
|---|
Full Specs
| HP Omnibook Ultra 14 Review | |
|---|---|
| UK RRP | £1297 |
| USA RRP | $1349.99 |
| CPU | AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 |
| Manufacturer | HP |
| Screen Size | 14 inches |
| Storage Capacity | 1TB |
| Front Camera | 9MP webcam |
| Battery | 68 Whr |
| Battery Hours | 15 00 |
| Size (Dimensions) | 227.6 x 315.1 x 16.4 MM |
| Weight | 1.57 KG |
| Operating System | Windows 11 |
| Release Date | 2024 |
| First Reviewed Date | 26/03/2025 |
| Resolution | 2240 x 1400 |
| Refresh Rate | 60 Hz |
| Ports | 2x USB-C, 1x USB-A, 3.5mm Headphone jack |
| GPU | AMD Radeon 880M |
| RAM | 32GB |
| Connectivity | Wifi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 |
| Display Technology | LCD |
| Screen Technology | IPS |
| Touch Screen | Yes |
| Convertible? | No |
The post HP Omnibook Ultra 14 Review appeared first on Trusted Reviews.