HP was the first to bring a Qualcomm Snapdragon Windows 11 laptop to India a couple of months back, though I did try the ASUS Vivobook S 15 that came out flying on most counts with the price tag. Priced at Rs 1,68,999, the HP EliteBook Ultra G1q is the company’s offering with ARM-based chips with AI loaded. I have been using this laptop for a couple of weeks now and here’s how my experience been:
The laptop’s look and feel are very similar to last year’s HP Dragonfly series – its lightweight at about 1.3kg and is thin, too. Made up of mix of plastic and recycled aluminium, the laptop feels premium and sturdy, except maybe the hinge part, which could have been a little stronger with tauter-like hinges instead of the less stiff ones used here. On the right side, you get a USB type C port and 3.5mm audio jack; while the left side houses two USB type C gen 4.0 ports (with DisplayPort) for data transfers and charging. The 14-inch (16:10 aspect ratio) display has relatively small bezels on the side with the 5MP webcam at the top with its physical shutter and HP branding at the bottom looking subtle enough to not be distracting. The area around the trackpad and the lid do catch smudges and fingerprints and may require a quick cleaning occasionally.
The 14-inch QHD (2240 x 1400) IPS touch-enabled panel is pretty good but not that great considering the price tag. It’s usable outdoors under direct sunlight and has 60Hz refresh rates. It has good viewing angles and is generally sharp for consuming content or reading but absence of HDR as well as higher refresh rates make this a notch below the competing notebooks. The trackpad is plenty large and generally reliable to work with for Windows’ gestures and tracking and clicking most of the times. Keyboard, on the other side, isn’t my favourite thing about this laptop. They keys don’t quite have enough travel – giving more of a trifling feel when typing quickly and I didn’t get used to how the keys feel even after using it for a couple of weeks. The Copilot key sits on the right in place of the right CTRL key and brings up Copilot generative AI for your queries, image generation and related stuff. The generative AI function was quick in response when I did try it a few times for suggesting some photos ideas as well as notetaking.
Powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite - X1E78-100 chip (up to 3.4Ghz 12-core processor and Adreno X1-85 3.8TFLOPS GPU), 16GB LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB m.2 PCIe SSD, the laptop runs on Windows 11 Pro 24H2 version. Day-to-day performance of the laptop has been satisfactory for me. It handled Web browsing, editing documents, Email syncing in the background with OneDrive sync switched on without hiccups. It did show some issues when playing 4k videos locally or in the media player but after a restart and trying different browsers, it worked in the media player PotPlayer and in Firefox the Web browser much better than before. It handled multiple tabs in two Web browsers with a video playing in one just fine, too. Instant wake up also works nicely compared to Intel’s chips. Gaming isn’t something the laptop is targeted at whether you look at the display or the performance – you can expect to play a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 at around 25FPS and nothing higher. I didn’t notice any high fan noise throughout my usage of the laptop, though, and saw quiet fan with dual pipes for cooling solutions under the hood.
The dual speakers near the front are quite loud and clear and have decent depth to them for some bass, doing a good job for watching movies and TV shows when indoors or for making calls. Enable with WiFi and powered by a 59Whr battery unit, the laptop comes with a 65watt USB type C charger in the box. The EliteBook lasted me 12-13 hours quite comfortably most of the days and didn’t show more than 2 per cent loss in battery when kept in standby mode overnight, which is nice to see. It charges from 1 per cent to full in about two hours or so while working on it.
With the price tag, the HP EliteBook Ultra G1q does seem a bit steep given the performance and whole package. It is a good looking laptop with a nice display and good performance, and great battery life but the competition has similar offerings with a lower price tag, so you might be better off considering this when on a deal.
