HP OmniBook 5 14 review: an OLED is almost enough

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

You’re probably familiar with the expression “good, cheap, fast – pick two.” I didn’t like the high-end OmniBook I reviewed last year. It was fast, but it had a weak IPS screen, terrible speakers, and cost $1,200. But what if we were now talking about a much nicer screen, even better battery life, and for $500 less? As you might expect, the OmniBook 5 has some flaws. But for the right price, a lot can be forgiven.

HP OmniBook 5 laptops are available in 14-inch and 16-inch sizes, either in traditional shells or 2-in-1 form, and with chip options from Intel, AMD and Qualcomm. I tested the cheapest: a 14-inch with a low-end Arm-based Snapdragon

This is a great deal for a quality laptop with an OLED display. And it’s often on sale, sometimes for as low as $480, which is incredibly low. OLED-equipped laptops normally cost over $1,000, and there are plenty of models well above that price with cheaper IPS panels. The OmniBook’s 1,920 x 1,200 panel isn’t very high resolution, but at 14 inches it’s just large enough to stay sharp, and it delivers the deep black levels and color contrast you only get with an OLED. The downsides to 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 by a big, bright window, but it can be done.

This screen is associated with two other very good key components: a good keyboard and marathon battery life. The keyboard is comfortable to type on, even for long periods of time. I wouldn’t mind deeper key travel, but it’s still more tactile than a MacBook. The keys also feature very large legends that might help people with vision problems, although they are slightly betrayed by a lack of backlighting.

The OmniBook 5’s other appeal is the 59Wh battery life. It’s 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, lots of multi-app messaging, and some music or video streaming, this lasts all day, well into the evening, and possibly until your next lunch break. The only time I chewed up the battery at an alarming rate was when trying to use a number 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 seemed sluggish when quickly switching between many open applications (on just two virtual desktops). It didn’t stop, or crash, or anything serious, but I could feel it. Oddly, the same processor didn’t bog down when I used it in Microsoft’s 13-inch Surface Laptop. I also tested two different Chromebooks using Arm-based MediaTek chips for around this price (one also with an OLED), and both seemed snappier. Not to mention the much faster M4 MacBook Air, which now regularly costs just $750. The OmniBook is mostly fine for light tasks, but it’s not difficult to push it too far. And that threshold will become easier and easier to cross as it ages, like any computer.

I wish that was the only problem with the OmniBook 5. The mechanical trackpad works well overall, but when you place your finger down – before clicking – you hear an audible ticking sound and feel a tactile vibration. This annoying quirk looks like a pre-click or fake double-click every time you simply click. It doesn’t happen 100 percent of the time, but it annoys me 100 percent when it does.

The most audible problem is with the speakers, which sound like a stereo drowned in mud. They’re similar (or perhaps identical) to the two bottom-firing speakers in the HP OmniBook XI reviewed last year. Just like this iteration, they sit right under your wrists and use any surface underneath the laptop to bounce sound back to you. This is especially ineffective when that surface is your soft, sound-absorbing knees. They’re usable for calls and passable for podcasts, but don’t do any favors for the 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, it doesn’t feel like a punishment from IT. I’d rather look at the OLED screen of the OmniBook 5 than the lukewarm 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 get around its lackluster speakers, while still having money left over.

Cheaper laptops mean putting up with at least some flaws. There are ways to overcome most OmniBook 5 problems, like using external sound and a mouse, or reminding yourself that you’ve made a deal. For the money spent, you get some treats in the form of a beautiful screen and phenomenal battery life, and that goes a long way. If you rate these features highly like me, the OmniBook 5 is at least nice. At $500 or less, recently on sale, I would get it, but only for light computing needs. At its usual price, I’d get a Microsoft Surface laptop or a faster M4 MacBook Air for the lowest price possible — both of which are often marked down to $750. Or, if you can get away with running ChromeOS, the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 also offers sleek OLED and excellent battery life, with better performance and speakers that don’t mangle the music.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge