Earlier this year, HP rebranded its entire laptop portfolio, and the Dragonfly became the EliteBook Ultra. There was just one problem. Other than the color, the Snapdragon-powered EliteBook Ultra was nothing like a Dragonfly. It bothered me because for a long time, I considered the Dragonfly to be the best laptop on the market, and then HP took away its identity.

As I suspected at the time, and at the OmniBook Ultra launch, HP saved the good stuff for Intel. At CES, the company announced the EliteBook Ultra G1i, a similar product that's powered by Intel Lunar Lake, but it's also totally different. In fact, it has most of what I criticized the G1q for not having.

HP sent us a pre-production unit of the EliteBook Ultra G1i for a hands-on. It did not have any input on the contents of this article.

It's lighter than a MacBook Air

OK, the EliteBook Ultra G1i isn't quite as light as a Dragonfly, but unlike the EliteBook Ultra G1q, which it's not called, it's not aluminum. Aluminum makes for a heavier laptop, while magnesium is lighter. It now starts at 2.63 pounds, rather than 2.97 pounds. It makes a big difference.

Since we so often like to use Apple as a benchmark, the MacBook Air is 2.7 pounds, and I do think that's a bit of a sweet spot. We might not see the Dragonfly's 2.2 pounds again, but at least it's closer.

It comes in Atmosphere Blue, similar to what we've seen since the product's debut in 2019. Colors are somewhat rare in business laptops, with the bulk of the market coming in either silver or black. That's why the EliteBook Ultra sits at the top of the lineup. It's for the person at the company that's allowed to stand out. It's the prettiest business laptop out there.

Touchpad and display improvements

The HP EliteBook Ultra G1i has a haptic toughpad, finally. It's something that the G1q was lacking, and in fact, it's something even the Dragonfly didn't have. There were a handful of weird Chromebook variants of the product that did have one, so it was always weird that the feature never made its way to the Windows flavors.

And of course, this guy has an OLED display, whereas the G1q had a mediocre 2.2k 300-nit screen. Indeed, HP got a lot right with the EliteBook Ultra G1i. It's delightful.

Poly Camera Pro

I've been saying for several years now that HP laptops have the best webcams around, and the EliteBook Ultra is no different. I'm not going to go too into the weeds on this, since I really just want to say "webcam good", but the Poly Camera Pro software that's included is awesome. It does the NPU-based functions that we see from Windows Studio Effects, such as background blur, and more.

You can control pretty much everything about your video, adjusting the color, brightness, zoom, and you can replace your background. You can add overlays too.

It supports external webcams too, which is how I typically use it since I usually use a laptop with a dock. In order to turn it on, you just have to switch to the virtual camera that's created by Poly Camera Pro.

HP AI Companion!

Listen, I know you don't want to read about AI. I have lots of data that tells me that every day. You've been told for years and years that some big thing is coming, it's going to change your life, and it never delivers. And you're jaded from it. The same thing is happening right now with AI, but that doesn't mean it won't be useful.

As I've said in several reviews now, HP's AI Companion is the only AI tool that I find truly useful, that actually makes me want to return to its products. I review tons of products with lots of unique features, but when I'm done, I usually leave those features behind. I miss AI Companion when I leave that behind.

Now, as I sit here preparing for CES, I'm looking at 17 embargoed press kits with 152 PDFs and 10 Word docs. When I go to write a news story about a product like the EliteBook Ultra G1i, I'm usually bouncing around between a press release, a spec sheet, and some other fact sheet with a list of features. When I get to the part about, say, how much it weighs, I have to find the spec sheet tab and look through a packed document to find it. While it doesn't sound like much, it's a lot when you have to do it multiple times, and you're working on dozens of stories.

Now, I drop all of the PDFs in AI Companion, one press kit per project, of course. Then, I can just ask it what the weight of the product is, and it tells me. It's saved me a ton of time.

It's also super-fast, other than the initial indexing which does take a good 10-15 minutes. It only takes a few seconds to get an answer.

There's one key limitation, unfortunately, which is that each library can only take up to 100MB of files, so when I get those companies that like to pack their press decks with high-res images and such, I'll have to do something else. Fun fact: HP's own press kit had several ~30MB PDFs in it, so I couldn't fit them all in an AI Companion library. I'm going to give them such a hard time about that.

The best business laptop? I wouldn't go that far

This is a fantastic product. Since it's a pre-production unit, I can't run any benchmarks or do any kind of extensive testing, as they might not represent the final product. However, I've been using it for over a week and it's delightful.

Indeed, I'm always happy to recommend HP's laptops, as they're some of the best around, especially EliteBooks. There's a 'but' in there though. I think the EliteBook X is better, which feels strange to say since it's a step down in the lineup. But it's the so-called total package that I used to consider the Dragonfly to be. It has 5G, and it has what's probably the best keyboard I've ever used on a laptop.