All hail the HP OmniBook Ultra 14 – the battery life king of compact laptops

The HP OmniBook Ultra 14 is direct competition for the Asus Zenbook A14, a fine superlight 14in OLED laptop that we have had a lot of time for here at ITPro. Both machines are built around Qualcomm's latest 2nd-generation Snapdragon X2 chipsets, and both will set you back around £1,300.

There are some important differences though. Firstly, HP has equipped its laptop with a touchscreen, something that's not an option on the Asus machine or that other stalwart of the compact laptop world, the Apple MacBook Air.

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Secondly, the HP uses a less potent processor, the 10-core X2P-64-100, rather than the 18-core X2E-88-100. That makes the two machines subtly different in their approach to answering what is basically the same question.

There are several different versions of the 2026 OmniBook Ultra 14 available, some with Intel's Core Ultra 3 Panther Lake processors, some with 3K OLED displays, along with 32GB of RAM and 1TB SSDs, but our review model is the entry-level, and thus also the cheapest, available to buy in the UK.

HP OmniBook Ultra 14: Design

Made entirely of aluminium, except for the plastic base plate, the OmniBook Ultra is physically and visually a very sharp piece of kit. Thanks to some heavily sculpted sides, the right-angled edges are only 3mm thick.

At 1.24 kg, the OmniBook is rather heavier than the unusually lightweight Zenbook A14, which tips the scales at less than 840g. It's the same weight as a 13.6in MacBook Air, though, so it's hardly a porker.

The HP's external dimensions of 311 x 215.6 x 10.7 mm compare favourably with the competition: It's thinner than both the Zenbook A14 and MacBook Air, and thanks to those sculpted edges, it feels even thinner again.

Despite the thin profile, the OmniBook feels reassuringly solid, with both the body and lid manfully resisting our best efforts to bend them out of shape. HP boasts that the OmniBook Ultra has passed "20 MIL-STD tests", though it keeps quiet about precisely which ones.

There's one colorway which HP describes as 'Stone blue with a sandblasted finish'. It's easy enough on the eye, but more importantly it doesn't show fingerprints, so it keeps everything looking pretty much box-fresh even after regular use.

We're not typically fans of the all-Type-C approach to ports, but at least HP has fitted the OmniBook Ultra with three rather than two, meaning you can charge from either side. All three are 40Gbps-rated and support a DisplayPort 2.1 video feed.

We found it quite liberating to have a compact laptop that leaves you with two free Type-C ports after you use one to connect to all your sundry desktop accessories via a dock. The Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 WLAN card supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, so nothing is lacking with wireless connectivity.

Getting inside the OmniBook Ultra 14 is a breeze, but once in, all you can do is swap out the 2280 M.2 SSD, replace the battery, and blow fuzz out of the two fans. The memory modules and WLAN card are all fixed in place.

HP OmniBook Ultra 14: Keyboard, touchpad, and webcam

The keyboard benefits from a solid foundation, so there's little flex even under pressure, and generously sized 20mm-square keycaps. The keys have 1.3mm of travel and a light, silent action, making typing an effortless and unobtrusive undertaking. The two-stage white backlight works well with the white-on-grey keycap graphics if you need to type in low-light environments.

The touchpad is a sizeable 140 x 85mm haptic affair with a mylar covering. The size means there is ample space for the most extravagant of gestures as well as the edge-swipe zones on the left and right sides for display brightness and volume, though these can be disabled should you wish.

Of course, the great benefit of a haptic touchpad is that it's effectively silent in use. This makes the OmniBook Ultra the perfect device for use in a library or lecture theatre where erroneous laptop noises may not be easily tolerated.

There's a lot to like about the webcam. To start with, it's a 1440p affair that produces very crisp images. It's colourful too, and handles sudden changes in ambient lighting well. Beyond the impressive core performance, the camera array can be covered with a manual privacy shutter, and it supports Windows Hello IR facial recognition.

HP OmniBook Ultra 14: Display

The HP's 60Hz OLED display is very much a game of two halves. We like the wide-gamut color support with volumes of 162% sRGB and 99.5% DCI-P3 and the impressive accuracy: Put the display into P3-D65 mode in the HP control panel, and the resultant Delta E accuracy came back at an impressive 1.1.

The negatives are a rather low peak brightness of 285 nits (HP claims 300, but the difference is neither here nor there) and a very reflective screen surface. That's a combination that makes the HP borderline unusable outdoors in anything approaching bright sunlight.

For comparison, the display in the Zenbook A14 can get close to 390 nits while a MacBook Air can easily top 500 nits. That's one heck of a difference. There's no point worrying about the difference in brightness in HDR mode rather than SDR mode because the OmniBook's display doesn't support HDR.

Of course, neither the MacBook nor the Zenbook's display is touch-enabled, and the OmniBook's screen is made from genuine Corning Gorilla Glass 3 over it to keep it scratch-free.

HP OmniBook Ultra 14: Specs, performance and battery life

The Snapdragon X2P-64-100 CPU is the second up from the bottom in the new second-generation lineup and comes with 10 cores, six of which are termed, somewhat counter-intuitively, Prime with a maximum speed of 4.0GHz and four Performance at 3.4GHz along with 16GB of multi-channel LPDDR5x RAM.

From a cursory glance at the differences between the ARM processors in the OmniBook and the Zenbook A14 and M5 MacBook Air machines, you would expect the latter duo to beat the HP like a red-headed stepchild, but the differences are rather less.

To give two headline benchmark scores, the HP returned Cinebench R24 scores of 973 multi-core and 133 single-core, compared to 1139 and 147 from the Asus, while in the 3DMark Night Raid graphics test the HP scored 33,406 to the Zenbook's 40,574.

Turning to the ubiquitous Geekbench test, the OmniBook scored 3,157 single-core and 14,653 multi-core. For the Zenbook A14, the results were 3,569 and 19,713, while the M5 MacBook came in at 4,199 and 17,213.

Clearly then, while the Asus and Apple machines return the higher scores, the difference is not so dramatic as to give anyone pause when choosing a machine for everyday computing duties.

Indeed, given that the Asus Zenbook A14 has 18 CPU cores to the HP machine's 10 and a more potent GPU with twice as many shaders, we expected the gap to be greater. In basic day-to-day use, we'd go as far as to say that the differences are essentially impossible to discern.

When it comes to running local AI tasks, the HP is as good as any other laptop in the same market category thanks to an 80TOPS NPU. This, of course, means the OmniBook is fully Copilot+ compliant, so you get Windows' features like Recall and generative fill in Paint.

The 512GB Phison SSD turned in a very impressive average sequential read time of 7,200MB/s. Sequential write speed was more par for the course at 3,010MB/s, but it's still a good showing overall.

Where the HP's less potent chipset pays dividends is in battery life. In our standard video rundown test where we loop a video using VLC with the display brightness set to 170 nits, the HP pushed on to a superb 37hrs 15mins. That's 7 hours better than the Asus Zenbook can manage, also from a battery with 70Wh capacity.

Of course, the Asus Zenbook A14 is still a strong performer in this arena, and can happily run for twice as long as an M5 MacBook Air. But the OmniBook Ultra can do better than the MacBook Air by a factor of 2.5. Colour us impressed.

HP OmniBook Ultra 14: Is it worth it?

Providing you don't plan on using your laptop outdoors, where the dim and reflective screen will soon become an irritant, the OmniBook Ultra 14 has a lot going for it, not least the epic battery life, which we found good enough to get through three working days with a commute at the end of each, and then some.

Dimness aside, the display is colorful and color-accurate and touchable, while the sound system is top-notch. The keyboard and touchpad are easy to recommend, and on balance we applaud HP's decision to equip the OmniBook Ultra with three Type-C ports even if that means no USB-A or HDMI options.

For the money, the OmniBook Ultra is also a very smart and well-made laptop, and even though the Snapdragon chipset is almost the runt of the X2 litter, its performance was more than up to snuff.

HP OmniBook Ultra 14: Specs