I used only the HP OmniBook 3, and here's what I found

I recently moved my entire working life onto the HP OmniBook 3 NextGen AI: no home office setup, no second monitor, just this device. There were moments when I was genuinely surprised, and a few points I liked less. I didn’t test it in a lab, but in the ups and downs of my everyday life.

Context

Is the OmniBook 3 a high-end laptop for power users with maximum performance needs? Certainly not, but I think that doesn’t apply to most of us. For higher demands, the HP OmniBook family offers other devices. The OmniBook 3 is HP’s everyday AI PC:

• 16 inches
• Snapdragon X processor
• 16 GB of RAM
• in my version, 512 GB of storage
• Copilot+ PC

So it’s not a high-end creator monster, but a laptop for people looking for a reliable companion for work, university and normal everyday life.

Design and ports

At 2.5 cm thick and 1.66 kg, the OmniBook 3 is very slim and pleasantly light for a 16-inch model. That thrills me, because I’m on the road a lot and don’t want to haul a lot of weight in my bag, but I also don’t want to give up a big screen. The build quality is high, as usual with HP, and everything feels sturdy. The keyboard and touchpad are high quality too, the keystrokes are dull and the clicking is pleasant.

For such a slim device, there are quite a lot of ports: USB-C, USB-A, HDMI and even a headphone jack, plus WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. I never had to carry an adapter set around on the go. For me that’s a small productivity gain, because I reliably forget extra accessories.

Display

The 16-inch display is truly anti-glare, nice and matte, which I find brilliant. When working outside at a cafe or by a window, that’s a real plus. The Full HD resolution is sharp enough for pure text work, research and video calls. If you work a lot with photos and color detail, you might miss a higher resolution: Full HD on 16 inches is solid, but not the sharpest you can get right now. It’s an LCD display, which isn’t as good as OLED, but stood out with very good color accuracy, stable viewing angles and rich colors.

Battery

It has a 68 watt-hour battery. It charges to 50% in 45 minutes. HP promises up to 36 hours of runtime. Realistically, with research, writing, video calls and a bit of YouTube, I easily get over two full workdays, plus a night in power-saving mode, without touching the charger. That’s an absolute plus. When I fire up the editing software and work on and export large 4K files, the battery gets drained properly. That’s normal, I always plan to edit on the go with a charging cable.

Snapdragon X and the ARM architecture

The battery lasts so long because the 2026 OmniBook 3 has a first-generation Snapdragon X inside. That’s an ARM architecture instead of the classic Intel or AMD chips. The advantage is strong performance with less power consumption, so more runtime. Another advantage: ARM processors generate hardly any heat and work almost silently, without the fan noise that bothers many people in everyday use.

The flip side is that not every piece of software runs natively on it. For me that wasn’t a drama: editing software, browser and Office ran cleanly and smoothly, even while multitasking. I had a browser with what felt like 25 tabs, a video call, the syncing cloud storage, Outlook and Word open at the same time, and the device didn’t buckle. That’s what everyday life looks like for most of us.

With DaVinci Resolve, I edited a video despite it not being designed for demanding video editing. The editing ran smoothly, the export took a bit longer than on my more powerful laptops, but those few minutes don’t make a big difference for me.

Important: if you depend on very specialized or older software or on games, you should check beforehand whether the programs have an ARM version or run properly through emulation. That’s not a dealbreaker, but a point you have to consider beforehand.

NPU and Copilot+

The Snapdragon architecture comes with its own NPU for AI tasks, the core of this device’s brand. Copilot is present at the press of a key and in many Windows programs. For a video, I had to quickly summarize a research overview on a topic. Normally that means endless filtering and summarizing; with the built-in AI it took a few minutes with a prompt. Travel and appointment planning and everything that costs time and annoys me in everyday life gets taken care of quickly. For me that’s one of the most important jobs of AI: taking work off my plate. Image and video generation also work well, and without additional software.

Verdict

The HP OmniBook 3 NextGen AI isn’t a laptop for people who need maximum performance for specialized software or current games. In that case, the ARM base may limit you. For anyone looking for a reliable, light everyday companion for university, home office and on the go, with smart AI support and a battery that refreshingly delivers what it promises for once, it’s a truly convincing device.