HP OmniBook 5 14 review: an OLED is almost enough

You know what I love more than OLEDs? Cheap OLEDs. And that’s exactly what drew me to the 14-inch HP OmniBook 5. It’s a $700 Windows laptop with a Snapdragon X Plus processor and an OLED screen. That means it should have great battery life and a beautiful screen. I consider these important in any laptop, so color me intrigued.

You’re probably familiar with the phrase “good, cheap, fast — pick two.” I wasn’t fond of the higher-end OmniBook I reviewed last year. It was fast, but it had a dim IPS screen, terrible speakers, and cost $1,200. But what if we’re now talking a much nicer screen, even better battery life, and for $500 less? The OmniBook 5, expectedly, has flaws. But for the right price, much can be forgiven.

HP’s OmniBook 5 laptops come in 14 inches and 16 inches, either as traditional clamshells or 2-in-1s, and with chip options from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. I’ve been testing the cheapest one: a 14-inch with a lower-end Arm-based Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 processor, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and — surprisingly for the price — that OLED, all for $699.99 .

That’s a bargain for a quality laptop with an OLED screen. And it’s often on sale, sometimes as cheap as $480 — mind-bogglingly low. Laptops with OLEDs normally cost more than $1,000, and there are plenty of models well above that price with cheaper IPS panels. The OmniBook’s 1920 x 1200 panel isn’t super high-res, but at 14 inches it’s just big enough to still look crisp, and it has the deep black levels and color contrast you only get with an OLED. The downsides of this otherwise great display are that it’s only 60Hz and lacks HDR, and its peak brightness is only 300 nits. It’s harder to work outside on a sunny day or sitting beside a big bright window, but it’s doable.

That screen is paired with two other very good, key components: a good keyboard and marathon battery life. The keyboard is pleasant to type on, even for long stretches. I wouldn’t mind deeper key travel, but it’s still more tactile than a MacBook. The keys also have very large legends that could help folks with vision challenges, though they’re slightly betrayed by a lack of backlighting.

The other draw of the OmniBook 5 is how long the 59Whr battery lasts. This is the kind of laptop you can take to the office without a charger for the day and not worry. Under typical mixed usage, with lots of active Chrome tabs, plenty of multi-app messaging, and a little music or video streaming, it lasts all day, well into the evening, and possibly into your next lunch break. The only time I chewed through the battery at an alarming rate was while trying to use a bunch of Copilot AI and Copilot Vision features — which are useless anyway, so don’t bother.

The OmniBook 5’s eight-core Snapdragon chip is power-efficient, but not particularly fast. It’s the only laptop I’ve used this year with a current-gen processor that sometimes felt sluggish when quickly switching among many opened apps (across only two virtual desktops). It didn’t grind to a halt or crash, or anything dire, but I could feel it. Oddly, the same processor didn’t get bogged down when I used it in Microsoft’s 13-inch Surface Laptop. I’ve also tested two different Chromebooks using Arm-based MediaTek chips for around this price (one also with an OLED), and both felt snappier. That’s not to mention the far faster M4 MacBook Air, which now regularly goes for as little as $750. The OmniBook is fine most of the time for light tasks, but it isn’t hard to push it too far. And that threshold will only get easier to cross as it ages, like any computer.

I wish that was the only thing wrong with the OmniBook 5. The mechanical trackpad is fine overall, but when placing your finger down — before actually clicking — you hear an audible tick sound and feel a tactile vibration. This annoying quirk is like a pre-click click or a false double-click whenever you single click. It doesn’t happen 100 percent of the time but it 100 percent gets on my nerves when it does.

The much more audible issue are the speakers, which sound like a stereo being drowned in mud. They’re similar to (or possibly the same as) the dual downward-firing speakers of the HP OmniBook X I reviewed last year. Just like that iteration, they line up right under your wrists and use whatever surface is under the laptop to bounce sound up to you. This is particularly ineffective when that surface is your soft, sound-absorbant lap. They’re workable for calls and passable for podcasts, but a disservice to any tunes you listen to while you work (as I often do).

The OmniBook 5 also shares some of the OmniBook X’s design, but unlike that 2024 model, this doesn’t feel like a punishment from IT. I’d rather stare at the OmniBook 5’s OLED screen than the tepid IPS panel of the OmniBook X, a laptop that cost around $1,200 at the time. At $700, you can buy this OmniBook 5, a great pair of headphones to circumvent its lackluster speakers, and still have money left over.

Cheaper laptops mean putting up with at least some shortcomings. There are ways to overcome most of the OmniBook 5’s, like using external audio and a mouse, or reminding yourself you got a deal. For the money spent, you get some treats in the form of a nice screen and phenomenal battery life, and that goes a long way. If you rank those features highly as I do, the OmniBook 5 is at least likeable. At $500 or below, which it recently hit on sale, I’d get it, but only for light computing needs. At its regular price, I’d get a faster Microsoft Surface Laptop or M4 MacBook Air for as cheap as I can find — both often discounted to $750-ish. Or, if you can get away with running ChromeOS, the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 also offers a slick OLED and great battery life, with better performance and speakers that don’t mutilate music.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge