HP Omnibook X Review, 9/10: A 14-Inch Laptop That Skips the Gimmicks and Nails the Fundamentals

No flip screen, no obsessively slimmed-down chassis — the HP Omnibook X (2026) looks like a laptop that's deliberately trying not to steal the spotlight. But according to an overseas TIDEZINE editor's review, this $1,400 machine, currently on sale for $900, earned a 9/10, and the reasoning is straightforward: it gets nearly everything right where it counts.

The chassis is built from anodized aluminum, weighing 2.9 pounds — lighter than the 14-inch MacBook Pro's 3.4 pounds — and measuring 12.6mm thick. The review notes that the build quality feels "like it was made for a tank." Open it up and you'll find a 14-inch 3K OLED display capable of 1,100 nits HDR brightness and 500 nits for everyday SDR use, with 100% DCI-P3 color coverage, 120Hz refresh rate, and a 16:10 touchscreen aspect ratio that offers more vertical viewing space than typical 16:9 machines. HP also offers 2K IPS LCD and 2K OLED variants, but both come with lower brightness and no touch support.

The review unit came equipped with 32GB of RAM and an Intel Core Ultra X9 388H processor, featuring a 16-core design with an integrated Arc B390 GPU. The author described the entire Windows 11 setup process as "blazing fast," and daily use — juggling multiple browser tabs, heavy photo editing, and 4K video editing — showed no signs of lag. In PCMark 10 benchmarks, the Omnibook X outperformed every other PC tested this year, only narrowly losing to the HP Omnibook Ultra (which uses the same processor) in Geekbench 6.

On the gaming front, the integrated Arc B390 averaged 81 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p high settings with Intel XeSS enabled, dropping to 45 fps with low-level ray tracing turned on. Its 3DMark Wildlife Extreme score beat comparable ultraportables from Intel and AMD, but lost to the ASUS ZenBook A16 running a Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 chip — a result the review called surprising. The author noted this isn't a gaming laptop, but it still holds practical value for media rendering or AI workloads, and cross-platform-optimized titles like Arc Raiders and Overwatch 2 run smoothly at 1080p.

The keyboard and trackpad are singled out as standout strengths: solid key travel with a natural feel, which the author flatly says beats Dell's edge-to-edge keyboard on the XPS 14/16. The trackpad uses haptic feedback and is fully clickable across its surface, with no mechanical parts to wear down over time — a better experience than the traditional trackpad on the XPS 13. On the flip side, the dual down-firing speakers were the sole knock against it; the review found them adequate for YouTube videos and casual music listening, but hoped HP would adopt a four-speaker array like Dell and Apple's higher-end models. The 5-megapixel webcam, meanwhile, delivered "surprisingly sharp, pleasantly colorful" quality on Zoom calls.

On battery life, the PCMark 10 Modern Office test clocked in at 18 hours and 25 minutes — over an hour less than the Omnibook Ultra and short of HP's claimed maximum of 29 hours — but the author considered it more than enough to get through two workdays without a charge. The bundled 65W GaN charger is rated by HP to reach 50% in 45 minutes; the review's real-world test measured 46 minutes.

As for ports, both sides of the chassis offer USB-C and USB-A, along with HDMI and a headphone jack — but there's no SD card reader, which the review argues could have easily fit given the remaining space on either side, especially for a laptop positioned toward professional users.

On pricing, the $900 sale price corresponds to the Core Ultra 5 variant with 16GB of RAM. Matching that same RAM capacity on the XPS 13 would close the price gap, but the review still finds the Omnibook X's build quality superior. Bumping up to a Core Ultra 7 costs an extra $190, and upgrading to 24GB of RAM at the same time adds another $360. The top-spec configuration tested here — Core Ultra X9 with 32GB of RAM — costs an extra $1,030, essentially the price of another laptop. The author suggests this tier is better suited to creative professionals with more budget flexibility.