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HP Elitebook Ultra G1q review: This laptop could become your co-pilot
Summary
Do the slick design and Snapdragon X Elite benefits coupled with HP’s unique AI add-ons make this a compelling proposition amongst its peers?Microsoft’s call to ARMs seems to be working, if the buzz around the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chipset in the new Copilot + PCs is anything to go by. First off the blocks was the plain-Jane Asus Vivobook S 15 Copilot+ PC, which provided an early indication of how the new ARM-architecture-based chip could breathe new life into modern Windows consumer laptops via dramatically improved performance per watt figures and big gains in battery life. The HP Elitebook Ultra G1q (Rs. 1,68,999) is among the very first enterprise-focused Snapdragon X Elite laptops to hit the market. Do the slick design and Snapdragon X Elite benefits coupled with HP’s unique AI PC add-ons make for a compelling proposition amongst its peers?
The EliteBook Ultra G1q follows HP’s new design language for its premium laptops, and the gorgeous dark blue, Atmospheric Blue colorway perfectly suits the 50% recycled aluminum clad ultra-thin laptop and sets it apart from the sea of silver and black corporate laptops. It’s an attractive, sleek device, 11.2mm at its thickest and at a shade under 1.35kgs, is easy to carry around for frequent business travelers or folks doing the hybrid work life. Despite the thin design, the rounded corners make it easy to handle when carrying around.
Open up the laptop, and the clean design continues to impress, right from the thin bezels on either side of the display to the minimalist branding on the palm rests. The keyboard is excellent—spacious, comfortable and with ‘just right’ amount of tactile response, while the trackpad is large and supports gestures through Microsoft Precision drivers. Expectedly for an ultra slim clamshell design, the port options aren’t that many, but it should be enough for most users—a single USB4 Type-C port, another Type-C 3.2 Gen 2 port and surprisingly even a USB-Type A port in a drop-jaw design. Sure, I can’t recall the last time I’ve needed the Type A port but it’s nice to have this flexibility in a business laptop. With no HDMI port, you’re going to need a dongle to connect to an external monitor, and there’s no SIM card slot for on-the-go use, though you do get the latest Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 for wireless connectivity.
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Looking up, you’re faced with the most bog-standard component of the Ultra G1q—its 14-inch, 2.2K (2240 x 1400 pixel) touch display. No OLED or mini LED tech here, but the 16:10 aspect ratio screen is great for productivity applications with that extra vertical space. It’s no pushover—the colors are rich and well saturated, details are clear and viewing angles are good, but the brightness levels of 300 nits are strictly for indoor use. Watching the trailer for the new Gladiator movie, the display kept pace with the on-screen action and could as easily double as a portable entertainment console mid-flight. Aiding this are the bottom mounted speakers, which are crisp and reasonably loud for a machine this thin.
There’s a 5-megapixel webcam with IR face recognition for Windows Hello logins, but there’s no fingerprint reader for authentication. While the webcam does well on video calls with its 1440p resolution video, Windows Camera's Studio Effects coupled with HP’s Poly Camera app lets you finetune your video feed (auto framing, spotlight, blurs and virtual background) to look your best. A nice touch is the sliding physical privacy shutter, as is the low blue light tech which reduces eye strain if you’re working on a long flight or stretching the hours at the office.
Setting it up, the Ultra G1q blazed through the setup process, which right away gives you a taste of what’s to come from the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 chip. Yes, this is a business laptop through and through, so while it will handle your work tasks, productivity applications and heavy browser use handily, it can handle heavier creative duties better if the app (like Photoshop) has made the transition to run natively on the ARM chipset architecture, while other apps which have yet to make the jump will run through the translation layer for now. The 16GB of speedy LPDDR5x memory and the 1 TB drive along with the instant wake up helps keep things snappy, but don’t expect too much by way of gaming capabilities on this machine. I mean, the Adreno GPU on the chip handles most casual games just fine, but they’re nowhere near a match for the discrete graphics of high-end gaming laptops.
What sets the Ultra G1q apart from other Copilot+ PCs is the inclusion of Windows 11 Pro, which brings in a bunch of enterprise-focused security and remote management features and slots along HP's Wolf Pro Security platform really well for added protection. Other than this, you get the usual CoPilot+ features—Live Captions, Windows Studio Effects, Cocreator in Pain and the chatbot—plus there’s the HP AI Companion which bundles an AI chatbot, summarization and analysis of your local files, among other features.
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Battery life is often the deal breaker for thin-and-light laptops and having a laptop which can last an extended workday without the charger is a big bonus. This is the second Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptop I've tested, and the concept of battery anxiety is truly a thing of the past. The 3-cell, 59 Wh battery on the G1q had it going past the thirteen-hour mark over nearly two full workdays of writing emails, poring over spreadsheets and attending work calls, and then some light streaming off OTT services, and on heavier days, with a good 30% left in the tank. Charging from empty takes a little under two hours with the included 65W slim charger.
The EliteBook Ultra G1q lives up to the superlatives in its name, and truly is a premium flagship showcase for the Snapdragon X Elite chip, with its all-day battery life, thin-and-light design and snappy performance for anything a corporate workload would throw at it. It’s pricier than the slightly heavier and thicker OmniBook X, HP’s consumer side AI PC, so you have to weigh your options on how much of the enterprise features your organization would need or value to fork up the extra premium.
