HP’s OmniBook 3 might not pack the latest-and-greatest processor, but it still delivers solid performance for the price. I was actually quite impressed by the IPS display and performance of this mid-range laptop, and I think you will be, too.

9/10

Operating System

Windows 11 Home

CPU

Qualcomm Snapdragon X

GPU

Qualcomm Adreno

RAM

8GB, 16GB, or 32GB

HP’s latest OmniBook 3 with the Snapdragon X processor is a record-breaking system. It’s lightweight, powerful, has a great screen, and impressive battery life. HP touts it as having “multi-day battery life” and it lives up to that claim. Plus, it has enough power to handle anything you throw at it, even light gaming. 

Pros & Cons

• Lightweight
• Great keyboard
• Fantastic battery life
• Plenty of power to handle everyday tasks
• Very repairable

• Non-upgradable RAM
• Last-generation processor

Price and Availability

The HP OmniBook 3 is available in three RAM and storage configurations. Pricing starts at $530, and you can get either 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB of RAM with either 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB of storage. An optional touchscreen is also available should you want it.

For a non-OLED display, this screen is pretty sharp

It could have fooled me

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

I’ve been using laptops for a long time, and, typically, I can spot an OLED verses an IPS panel—HP did a really good job fooling me here. I won’t say that I thought that it was definitely an OLED, but the thought crossed my mind that it could be an OLED, and that’s impressive in and of itself.

The 16-inch 1920×1200 panel only hits 300 nits of brightness, but I felt like it definitely got plenty bright enough in my office. I would have wished it could get a tad bit brighter when outside, but I’m also spoiled by daily driving a 14-inch M1 Max MacBook Pro with its XDR display which gets insanely bright in the sun.

This is definitely one of the best IPS displays that I’ve seen in a long time, so props to HP for making a vibrant display with deep blacks that isn’t OLED.

Onto the other input devices and peripherals with this laptop. The keyboard is surprisingly comfortable to type on. For a laptop that starts at $530, I could easily see myself using the built-in keyboard to write articles all day without any fatigue. The switches are satisfying, and the trackpad is quite solid for the price range.

On top of that, the keyboard offers both the traditional layout and a 10-key off to the side. This is something that we’re seeing less and less on laptops, so it’s nice to see a full-size layout from HP here for those who have to do a lot of number entry.

The port selection is also quite decent. On the right-hand side, you have a single USB-A port with a 3.5mm combination headphone/microphone jack. On the left, there’s an HDMI 2.1 port, as well as another USB-A port and two USB-C 10Gb/s ports, which also have USB-C Power Delivery 3.0 and DisplayPort 1.4 output capabilities.

However, I do want to point out that there is no USB4 or Thunderbolt on this laptop. While this isn’t necessarily expected in this price range, it is worth noting if you’re looking for a machine that does have faster 40Gb/s ports on it.

While the Snapdragon X is older, I was impressed with this laptop’s performance

You don’t need the latest and greatest for solid performance anymore

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

We are solidly in the Snapdragon X2 era, with the X3 chips on the horizon. So, being that the OmniBook 3 is using a last-generation Snapdragon X chip, how’s the performance?

I’ll say that the performance actually impressed me. My review unit has 32GB of RAM, so four times what it ships with as a base, but I really didn’t find that I ever hit a ton of RAM usage with what I was doing on this laptop.

The OmniBook 3 isn’t designed for heavy-duty workloads, high-end gaming, or intensive video or photo editing. Not to say it can’t do those things, but it’s not made for it.

I ran it through a number of tests to see how it would handle various workloads. For starters, on the synthetic test side, it received a 2,135 single-core and 10,677 multi-core score in Geekbench 6. If you want to compare that to a much higher-end processor, the Snapdragon X2 Elite, which scored 3,752 single-core and 20,496 multi-core, this laptop comes in at about half as powerful.

That’s to be expected, though. Cinebench 2024 is a bit of a similar tune, with a 95 single-core and 668 multi-core score, while the Snapdragon X2 Elite hit 150 single-core and 1,326 multi-core.

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

What do those numbers mean? Not a whole lot in the real world, but it’s nice to have synthetic numbers to compare to. What really matters is how the laptop feels to use, and this laptop actually feels pretty great.

Basically everything I threw at the OmniBook 3 handled quite well. Windows 11 was snappy and responsive, which is a chore in and of itself. Zip files unzipped as quickly as my Ryzen 9 7900X system most of the time, which was a bit of a surprise to me.

I’m sure heavily compressed files might not be the same, but, in my experience just downloading some zip files from the internet, like Cinebench 2024, it unzipped just as fast as I’d expect.

Like I said above when talking about the keyboard, I would have no problems running this as my main laptop to do daily work from. I wouldn’t necessarily want to do my 50MB RAW photo editing on it, or splice together 4K YouTube videos, but for day-to-day work, it’s perfect.

On the gaming side of things, it definitely leaves a lot to be desired, but that’s also to be expected. No Man’s Sky on standard settings at 1920×1200 sat at around 20 FPS while on planet. It was playable, but barely.

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

Forza Horizon 5 on low settings at 1920×1200 saw an average FPS of about 20, as well. Similarly, it was playable, but barely.

The thing is, the OmniBook 3 isn’t made to be a gaming laptop, so I didn’t expect to get a ton of performance out of it. The fact that, at native resolution, it hit 20 FPS in those titles is already pretty impressive. If you want to game on this laptop, just turn both the settings and resolution down and you’ll have a decent enough experience.

For power, I was happy to see that HP didn’t go with a proprietary cable, here. Instead, they’re using one of the USB-C ports on the side. This laptop ships with a 65W charging adapter and separate cable, which is nice as some companies ship an all-in-one charger where the cable is built into the wall adapter.

As far as battery life goes, this laptop blew me away. Realistically speaking, you can go multiple days with this laptop without charging it. Just in basic tasks, you should get well over 24 hours of usage out of it. If you’re killing this laptop in a single day, then you deserve an award because you must be hammering it. I really never saw the laptop die within a short time during any of my usage.

It might be an ARM processor, but you can still upgrade the storage yourself

Just don’t expect to be able to upgrade the RAM

For a long time, any computer or system in general with an ARM processor meant that the storage and RAM were both unupgradable. While the RAM is soldered on the OmniBook 3, meaning you can’t upgrade it yourself, the rest of this computer looks surprisingly repairable.

For starters, it only takes four Phillips screws to pull the bottom case off the OmniBook 3. From there, everything is very well laid out. For example, the battery is held in by five screws and no glue. Simply remove the five Phillips screws and the battery unplugs and can be replaced.

The NVMe drive is also user-upgradable. There’s a shell over the top of it that helps with heat dissipation, but that just takes two Phillips screws to remove, and then one more Phillips screw to pop the M.2 NVMe drive out to be replaced by a larger one.

This means that you can buy the base 256GB of storage now, and upgrade it to 1TB, 2TB, or whatever you want in the future.

The other parts also look fairly replaceable. With the WLAN (wireless networking) card being user-swappable, and the right side I/O ports being on a daughterboard that you could easily swap.

All-in-all, I think HP did a fantastic job here on repairability. RAM and CPU swapping is simply impossible with an ARM board, but what they could make modular, they did, and that deserves to be praised.

Should you buy the HP OmniBook 3 16-bz0002xx?

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

I think that the HP OmniBook 3 is a fantastic computer, especially for the price. With pricing starting at $530, and the only two things really affecting the price being the RAM and storage, this laptop definitely is a solid contender in its range.

Really, if you just need a good all-around laptop that can handle your day-to-day tasks, and even some more medium-weight tasks, then the OmniBook 3 is a great choice.

9/10

Operating System

Windows 11 Home

CPU

Qualcomm Snapdragon X

GPU

Qualcomm Adreno

RAM

8GB, 16GB, or 32GB

HP’s latest OmniBook 3 with the Snapdragon X processor is a record-breaking system. It’s lightweight, powerful, has a great screen, and impressive battery life. HP touts it as having “multi-day battery life” and it lives up to that claim. Plus, it has enough power to handle anything you throw at it, even light gaming.