The HP EliteBook Ultra is the successor to one of the best laptops on the market, the Dragonfly G4, so does it live up to it? Probably not, to be honest. It's a wonderful laptop, but there are a ton of compromises that made me wish the company just made a new model and swapped out the motherboard and chipset. I've reviewed hundreds of laptops, and while I'm so used to jumping from PC to PC, Qualcomm's new chipset makes me not want to use anything else.

HP sent me the EliteBook Ultra for review, although it's identical to the consumer-aimed OmniBook X where the hardware is concerned. This product is the successor to the Dragonfly G4, a product I've been using regularly since it was launched. Indeed, when we all go to product launches, more and more of us are using Dragonfly laptops, since it's that good.

It still has an excellent keyboard, and it's relatively lightweight. Gone are the days of the Elite Dragonfly being an ultra-light convertible, and the 3:2 display is gone now too. In fact, for a business laptop, there are very few options at all. There's no OLED display, no Sure View, no 5G connectivity, and there's only one USB4 port.

With the Snapdragon X Elite being so new, and the failure of Windows on Arm in previous years, I suspect HP just played it safe with this one. And that's fine. Performance is fantastic, battery life is long, and everything about the EliteBook Ultra just feels delightful to use.

HP sent us the EliteBook Ultra for review. It had no input on the contents of this article.

HP EliteBook Ultra and OmniBook X pricing and availability

The HP EliteBook Ultra and OmniBook X were released on June 18 as part of the first wave of Copilot+ PCs. They were two of 14 laptops to be the first to ship with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chipsets. The EliteBook Ultra starts at $1,699.99, while the OmniBook X starts at $1,149.99.

While they're the same hardware, albeit coming in different colors, the EliteBook Ultra is a business laptop, so it comes with Windows 11 Pro, a better warranty, and so on.

Specifically, the chip used is the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100, which is the lower-tier SKU, and you'll see that when we talk about benchmarks. However, unlike OEMs that used the X1E-80-100, the base model doesn't come with the Snapdragon X Plus. HP went all-in on X Elite.

Other specs include 16GB RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a 14-inch 2.2K display, while there are options to boost the storage to 1TB for a surprisingly small premium.

Design

All-aluminum and all-blue

Pretty much the only thing that the EliteBook Ultra has in common with the Dragonfly series is that it's blue (Atmospheric Blue is what it's called now), and hardware-wise, it's the one thing that's different from the gray or white OmniBook X. It's even made out of aluminum now, so the days of machined magnesium are gone.

Along with the magnesium chassis, it's also no longer under a kilogram in weight, something that was the Dragonfly's claim to fame for four generations. It now weighs in at 2.97 pounds, which is light for a 14-inch aluminum laptop. If this is the fifth generation of the Dragonfly, it's the third time the mainline product has been overhauled, while we've also seen variants like the Dragonfly Folio and Dragonfly Pro.

I should take a step back and talk about branding, because Elite and Pro are taking over all of HP's business laptops. It's not as much of a change as Omni taking over the consumer portfolio, but you should know that EliteBook Ultra is the new Dragonfly and EliteBook X will be the successor to the premium EliteBook 1000 series. As for what will become of the inexplicably consumer-focused Pro version of the Dragonfly, that's anyone's guess.

OK, back to the product. The Atmospheric Blue color is stunning, and designed to be so. Most business laptops come in a boring silver color, but this is meant to stand out. This is the product that the CEO of the company uses, and that person can stand out from the pack.

As for ports, it's somewhat limited for a business laptop. There's one USB Type-A port on the right, alongside a headphone jack. On the left, you'll find one USB4 Type-C port and one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port.

It's a bit disappointing. For one thing, every premium Intel laptop has a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, so it's unfortunate that one of these USB Type-C ports is USB 3.2. And on products like the Surface Laptop 7, Surface Pro 11, Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, and Dell XPS 13, they have Snapdragon X Elite chips and have all USB4 ports. It's not a chipset limitation.

The other thing I don't like is that both USB Type-C ports are on the left side of the device. It's a small annoyance, but life is a little easier with one port on each side, and HP knows this because that's how the latest EliteBook 1040 is designed.

Overall, the design is lovely. It's a crisp aluminum laptop that comes in a deep blue color, weighing in at under three pounds. My biggest issue with it is really just that it's not the Dragonfly, which just happened to be my favorite laptop on the market last year.

Display and keyboard

It's 2.2K, and that's your only choice

The HP EliteBook Ultra and OmniBook X come with a 14-inch 2240x1400 60Hz touchscreen, and that's it. Unlike other products in the company's portfolio, there are no OLED options, no Sure View privacy screen, and no different resolutions or refresh rates.

I appreciate that HP went for a proper 2.2K instead of FHD, so you don't get that little bit of pixelation that you have with 1200p, while it's not so high-res that it'll affect battery life. That said, there isn't much else to write home about with this screen.

In my testing, it supports 100% sRGB, 73% NTSC, 79% Adobe RGB, and 79% P3. That's not terribly bad, but it's not good either. Brightness came in at under 300 nits.

The keyboard is excellent and quiet. HP's keyboards are usually best-in-class, so there's no surprise there. Seriously, every HP presentation I sit in on talks about new steps they've taken to fight wobbly keys. It's great.

However, I should point out that it's probably not accurate to call this particular keyboard best-in-class, despite being very good, because the keyboard on the EliteBook 1040 G11 is actually better. While you certainly won't find it to be lacking in any way, it doesn't quite live up to the keyboards of its EliteBook and Dragonfly predecessors.

The touchpad is solid too, and it's large enough, taking up most of the available real estate. I feel like I'm starting to get spoiled by haptic touchpads though, and I find myself wishing HP used one here.

It comes with a 5.2MP 16:10 webcam, which is excellent. It's not quite as good as the sensors HP is using on other premium laptops, but it still beats most of the competition. That resolution gives you plenty of room for 1080p broadcasting to meetings, while still cropping the field of view for auto reframing.

Aside from Windows Studio Effects, which is a suite of features included in Copilot+, HP bundles its own Poly Studio Pro software, which has its own array of features. Along with effects that you can add, you can adjust things like brightness, saturation, and contrast, add spotlight lighting, adjust your field of view, and more. It's pretty great, and it's one thing that's unique to HP PCs.

AI and Copilot+

Do you care, and should you?

I've written pretty extensively about Microsoft's Copilot+ initiative in my reviews of the Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11. The bottom line is that while some of the features are nice to have, you shouldn't go out and buy a new PC to get it, especially with the flagship Recall feature MIA.

HP is packing its own AI Companion software on the EliteBook Ultra, something that differentiates it from the competition. Indeed, the company is really going hard on AI. It's betting big on the idea that people are going to care about this. I hope it's a long-term bet though, because I don't think anyone is buying a laptop for AI right now. People are going to buy a great laptop, and they can be delighted when new AI features are lit up for them, assuming they're not forced upon them in some annoying way. Once that starts to happen, then people start buying PCs for AI.

HP AI Companion, which comes in a window that's inexplicably not resizable, has a few features, none of which are truly unique. 'Ask' is a chat feature, similar to Microsoft's own Copilot. 'Analyze' is pretty neat, allowing you to drop some files into the app and have it do things like summarize documents. Then there's 'Discover', which looks like an FAQ, but it's actually a series of prompts. If you click on something like, "How can I improve my prompts," it asks AI Companion for the answer, and you can converse with it for more details.

Thanks to the NPU on the Snapdragon X Elite, this is happening on-device, and that's the whole point. If you're using the Analyze feature, you don't have to worry about dropping sensitive documents into the cloud.

HP AI Companion is a pretty smart implementation of AI on a laptop, and it's interesting to see HP succeed in using it for productivity in a way where Microsoft has failed. Copilot+ feels like a toy, filled with features that are more like party tricks.

Performance and battery life

Performance is great with one caveat

Like I said, after using a Snapdragon X Elite laptop, it's hard to recommend anything else. There are some compatibility issues, particularly with games, and I wouldn't recommend it for video editing just yet, but for most users, it's the best thing going. If you do want to play games, even casually, I'd look toward Intel Lunar Lake later this year.

Performance is great, and almost everything I use runs natively on Arm64, such as Google Chrome, Slack, OneNote, Photoshop, and so on. The one thing I use that's not native is Adobe Lightroom Classic, and it seems fine, except for the AI Denoise feature, which is awful. The newer Lightroom is native, so if you use that, you're good to go. I've been told that Lightroom Classic is never going native. Adobe promised Premiere Pro and Illustrator by the end of July but, well...here we are.

There are three SKUs of the Snapdragon X Elite, and HP went with the lowest one. It seems like almost every OEM either used the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 in all of its SKUs, or used the Snapdragon X Plus in its base models and the X Elite X1E-80-100 in upper-tier SKUs. I don't know what the price difference is between an X1E-78-100 and an X1E-80-100, but they're just different ways of hitting a certain starting price.

The bad news is that there's a considerable gap between the X1E-78-100 and the X1E-80-100. They're both 12-core chips, but the X1E-80-100 has two boost cores that are essentially overclocked when they need to be. The gap isn't as big between the X1E-80-100 and the X1E-84-100, which is only in the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge, because the only difference between those chips is that the boost cores are boosted a little more.

Lenovo also opted for the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 in its Yoga Slim 7x and ThinkPad T14s, while you'll find the X1E-80-100 in the Surface Pro 11, Surface Laptop 7, and Dell XPS 13.

You can see that there's a considerable delta in scores between the EliteBook Ultra and the Surface Laptop 7. I included the EliteBook 1040 G11 as well, which uses Intel's Meteor Lake platform. The Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 is mostly on par with it, except for tests that are being run in emulation.

As far as battery life goes, it's solid, although not quite as good as the 10+ hours I was getting on the Surface Laptop 7. My median scores were between 465 and 475 minutes, although there were some rare cases where I could stretch it over 10 hours. Certain things, like Google Meet, will really drain the battery. It makes sense. Streaming video uses more battery than general productivity tasks.

Should you buy the HP EliteBook Ultra or OmniBook X?

You should buy the HP EliteBook Ultra or OmniBook X if:

• You're looking for a premium business laptop
• You're on the go a lot
• You care about AI features

You should NOT buy the HP EliteBook Ultra or OmniBook X if:

• You need connectivity on the go
• You want an OLED display
• You're ediiting video a lot

Ultimately, I think the people purchasing an EliteBook Ultra should want a Snapdragon X Elite in a business PC. Right now, Dell has some Latitudes and Lenovo has the ThinkPad T14s, but those are meant to be more mainstream.

And the Snapdragon X Elite is great. If you're not gaming or editing video, it's hard to imagine anything else. However, I've also got the EliteBook 1040 G11 on-hand and I have to say, it really reminds me of the things missing from the EliteBook Ultra, like 5G, different display options, and even a keyboard that's better than the already excellent one on the Ultra.

Still, the EliteBook Ultra is easy to recommend, partly because the Snapdragon X Elite is so good and there are few proper competing products that use the chipset.

• HP OmniBook X

  Operating System

  Windows 11 Home or Pro

  CPU

  Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 (up to 3.4 GHz, 12 cores)

  GPU

  Qualcomm Adreno

  RAM

  Up to 32GB LPDDR5X

  Storage

  Up to 2TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe TLC M.2 SSD

  Battery

  59 Whr

  $1199 at Best Buy $1150 at HP

• HP EliteBook Ultra

  $1599 $1699 Save $100

  Operating System

  Up to Windows 11 Pro

  CPU

  Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite

  GPU

  Qualcomm Adreno graphics

  RAM

  Up to 32GB LPDDR5x

  Storage

  Up to 1TB PCIe M.2 SSD

  If you're looking for an interesting new laptop, this HP machine sports a Snapdragon Elite chip, 32GB of RAM, and up to 1TB of storage alongside a 2.2K IPS display. Plus, most importantly, you can find one of these for under $1000, making it an affordable buy.

  $1599 at HP $1699 at B&H