HP Omnibook X (2026) review: Nailing the basics

HP Omnibook X (2026) review: Nailing the basics It’s not flashy, but it still excels in almost every way. HP is making some excellent laptops this year. We loved the Omnibook Ultra, the company's most powerful ultraportable, and now we're looking at the Omnibook X, a slightly less flashy (but still powerful) notebook for professionals. Look past its somewhat prosaic design and you'll find a notebook that gets the basics right. It sports a glorious 14-inch OLED screen, along with some of Intel's fastest mobile chips, an excellent keyboard and trackpad and a ton of ports. Its starting price is reasonable: It's currently on sale for $900. But even its regular $1,400 price isn't obscene for an ultraportable. None of this is really new for HP. I've been a fan of every iteration of the Spectre x360 convertible, all the way back to its 2019 edition, but the Omnibook X feels like a refreshing throwback to a time before laptop gimmicks. It doesn't have a rotating screen, and it's not striving to be obscenely thin (if you want something slimmer, look at the Omnibook Ultra). It evokes the same sense of buttoned-up professionalism as the Surface Laptop or Apple's MacBook Pro. Sometimes, it's good to be a bit boring. What's notable about the Omnibook X? Reiterating what I said above, the Omnibook X really gets just about everything right. That was evident the minute I laid hands on it. The Omnibook X's smooth anodized aluminum case feels like it's meant for a tank. At 2.9 pounds, it's still lighter than the 3.4-pound 14-inch MacBook Pro, and it still feels relatively slim with its 12.6mm thickness. Open it up, and you're greeted with a glorious 14-inch 3K OLED screen, a wide lattice-free keyboard and a generously large haptic touchpad. Our review model was equipped with 32GB of RAM and Intel's speedy Core Ultra X9 388H chip, a 16-core beast with Intel's Arc B390 GPU, and it simply flew through the Windows 11 setup process. I can't speak for the performance of the Core Ultra 5 and 7 versions of the Omnibook X, but I'd wager their basic desktop performance (without counting intensive 3D games) would be similar. The 3K OLED display can reach up to 1,100 nits of HDR brightness and 500 nits of SDR (which is what you'll be seeing most of the time). As a 16:10 touchscreen, it gives you a bit more vertical space than typical widescreen displays. The 3K OLED option also sports a 120Hz refresh rate (for extra smooth scrolling and gaming), and it covers 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut. HP also offers 2K IPS LCD and OLED options, but neither are as bright and don't have touch capabilities. No matter which version of the Omnibook X you get, you'll be blessed with a ton of useful ports. It has USB-C and Type-A connections on both sides, as well as an HDMI port and a headphone jack. Given its professional audience, I would have liked to see an SD card reader too. There's certainly enough room for one on either side of its case. In-use: Ultraportable performance bliss The Omnibook X is a powerhouse. No matter what I threw at it — multiple browsers with dozens of tabs, incredibly large photo editing jobs and 4K movie editing — it never broke a sweat. I never encountered any slowdowns or other issues, it just felt like a very reliable workhorse. You shouldn't expect anything less if you're springing for Intel's X9 chip and its integrated 32GB of RAM, which adds the price of another laptop ($1,030!) to the Omnibook X. That chip also requires a $90 upgrade for the 3K OLED screen. I'll dive deeper into the Omnibook X's pricing options later in this review. For now, I can only review what's in front of me. And reader, I can't help but love it. The Omnibook X blew away every other PC we've seen this year in the PCMark 10 benchmark. It was only truly bested by the Omnibook Ultra, which has the same Intel chip, in Geekbench 6's tests. When it comes to gaming, the integrated Intel Arc B390 GPU averaged an impressive 81 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 while playing in 1080p with high graphics settings and Intel's XeSS frame generation. It could only muster an average of 45 fps with the low ray tracing preset, but that's still an impressive figure for something that isn't a truly dedicated GPU from AMD or NVIDIA. Its 3DMark Wildlife Extreme score was far better than other Intel and AMD ultraportables, but I was surprised to see it bested by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 chip in the ASUS ZenBook A16. The Omnibook X isn't a gaming laptop, by any means, but its GPU could be useful for media rendering or offloading AI workloads. And it's still decently capable for a bit of light gaming in 1080p. Arc Raiders and Overwatch 2, games that can scale well across a wide variety of hardware, were very playable on the Omnibook X. And no matter what you're doing on this computer, it all looks great on its 3K OLED screen. As is typical for OLEDs, it delivers excellent contrast and surprisingly high HDR highlights, along with very accurate color reproduction. If you care about visual fidelity and sharpness, it's worth paying a bit more for the 3K OLED screen over the Omnibook X's 2K OLED and LCD options. As for the rest of its hardware, the Omnibook X's 5-megapixel webcam was surprisingly sharp and colorful during Zoom calls. Its dual downward-firing speakers were adequate for YouTube videos and light music, but I'd love to see HP flex its hardware muscle a bit to include quad speaker arrays like we see on Dell and Apple's premium notebooks. That's really the only aspect of the Omnibook X that disappointed me a bit. It's clear HP paid far more attention to the Omnibook X's keyboard and touchpad, both of which are excellent. The keyboard has a satisfying amount of travel, and it felt very natural to use, unlike the lattice-free design on Dell's XPS 14 and 16. I breezed through typing this review on the Omnibook X without any complaint. Its smooth haptic touchpad was also a breath of fresh air after suffering through the XPS 13's more archaic pad. Since the Omnibook's touchpad is haptic, every part of it is clickable, and there aren't any mechanical moving parts that can wear down over time. In the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery benchmark, the Omnibook X lasted for 18 hours and 25 minutes, over an hour less than the Omnibook Ultra. That's a far cry from the potential 29 hours of battery life HP touts, but it's still more than enough to use the laptop for two workdays without a charge. And when you need to charge, the bundled compact 65W GaN charger can juice up the Omnibook to 50 percent in 45 minutes, according to HP. (In my testing, it took 46 minutes to reach 50 percent.) Should you buy the HP Omnibook X? While it doesn't really stand out in the crowded field of ultraportables design-wise, the Omnibook X does so many things well its simplified looks don't matter much. It's a sturdy and powerful machine that can be specced way up, depending on your needs. Its $900 sale price (at the time of this review) is an excellent deal, even if it comes with a slower Intel Core Ultra 5 chip and 16GB of RAM. You'd have to upgrade the new XPS 13 to a similar price to get the same amount of memory, and it doesn't feel nearly as well-built. If you need a bit more power, you can bump the Omnibook X up to Intel's Core Ultra 7 chip for $190, or spend $360 to get that chip with 24GB of RAM. As much as I liked the souped-up Core Ultra X9 chip in our review model, it only makes sense for dedicated creative professionals (especially if you can convince your IT department to order that version). Wrap-up The Omnibook X is the perfect ultraportable for anyone who wants a capable and reliable machine without much flash. Not every laptop needs to contort into a tablet, after all. It's a reminder that simply getting the fundamentals right can make for a very compelling product.