Review: HP Omnibook 5 delivers long life and light weight, no miracles

You can buy HP’s Omnibook 5 14 for a shade under NZ$1500. It’s ideal if you value portability and battery life over performance. This would be the right laptop for a senior school student, an undergraduate or someone working in an administrative role.

And yes, it’s good for journalists.

It has the power to deal with anything web-enabled, traditional office apps, media streaming and light creative work. You’d need to spend more to get enough processor power for video editing or 3D rendering.

Don’t choose this if you run GPU-intensive tasks and despite the AI branding, the key feature in this laptop is its battery life.

Likewise, if you are a demanding gamer you should buy something with a better GPU and a faster screen refresh rate.

Build quality

While the build quality is perfectly serviceable for home and office use, it’s not made of premium materials and may not cope with rough and tumble.

It’s not as robust as Microsoft’s laptops, nor as sturdy as an Apple MacBook.

You could commute to an office with it, but, perhaps, not to a building site or a farm. Think twice about giving one to a teenager who may not treat it with enough care.

Overall, it’s good value for the asking price. This is a solid mid-range Windows laptop with long battery life, a decent screen and keyboard.

Depending on deals, you may be able to shop around for a laptop with more powerful processor at the same price, but this is an all-round well-balanced option that should be on any mid-range Windows laptop buyer’s short-list.

Snapdragon X Plus processor

HP has chosen a Snapdragon X Plus chip for the Omnibook 5 14. The specific processor in the review computer is a X1-26-100, the base model in the range — 8-core, 4nm process, 45 TOPS NPU. It prioritises power efficiency over performance.

That explains why HP claims up to 34 hours of battery life, which, if true, would be exceptional in a Windows laptop. I never saw that in testing.

To be blunt, it’s hard to confirm such long battery life in the ten days or so we have to test review laptops. I can confirm it consistently delivered more than 24 hours between charges.

The review model only has 16GB Ram, which again, is at the low-end for today’s laptops. You’ll be able to run multiple apps at the same time, but open too many apps or too many browser windows and you’ll be crawling. The 512GB of storage is typical of the sub-NZ$1500 laptop market and means you won’t be storing large video or music libraries.

Keyboard, trackpad, display

HP has fitted the OmniBook 5 14 with a large, spacious keyboard. Keys are not quite full-size, but so near that it makes no difference. Typing feels natural and easy. Modern mid-range laptop keyboards tend to be good, but this is as good as you’ll find.

I’ve yet to see a Windows laptop with a touchpad as good as those on MacBooks. The one on the OmniBook 5 14 works fine, but it does not feel as smooth or as natural as Apple’s touchpad.

The box describes the screen as ‘2K’, which stretches the truth slightly. In practice you get a 1920×1200 resolution Oled display with a 60Hz refresh rate.

Again, the screen is good for a laptop in this price range. Text is sharp, colours and contrast are excellent. It’s bright enough indoors, but hard to read in direct sunlight.

Verdict: HP Omnibook 5 14

You get a lot of laptop for less than NZ$1500 when you buy an HP Omnibook 5 14. It has outstanding battery life, a decent screen, good keyboard, OK touchpad and is built strong enough for most users’ needs.

What you don’t get is raw computing power and that could be an issue if you purchased one of these specifically for AI applications. That’s likely, given how often HP uses ‘AI’ in its marketing. Otherwise it is a well balanced laptop for everyday use.

Worth knowing: Do you need an AI laptop?

These days you’d be hard pressed to find a mid-range or premium laptop that is not promoted as having, at least, “AI-enhanced” capabilities.

You may not want or need an AI laptop and, realistically, buying one may not make a practical real-world difference.

Yet, this is where we are in late 2025. Whether you need an AI laptop or not, that’s almost certainly what you will buy unless you’re shopping for a low-end model.

This situation is not necessarily bad. In fact, as we shall see, AI laptops can be great value. At the same time, you might do well to take some of the AI hype with a pinch of salt.