The PC is changing, and while not everyone’s entirely clear about what variation to expect, artificial intelligence’s influence is clear. That’s the really concise summary of Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs, of which we’ve seen a few already. Qualcomm’s played its part with the Snapdragon X chips, which after years of Microsoft trying, finally put the arm-architecture truly on the Windows heat map. As PC makers rush to beef up their product lineups, HP’s making a rather interesting proposition – take the AI smarts to work. It may just be on to something here.
The HP EliteBook Ultra G1q has the fundamentals an enterprise’s IT manager would appreciate, as would consumers, if they don’t want to compromise on an additional security layer as well. A truly hybrid approach. An individual or a business would be parting with a significant amount of money, to the tune of ₹1,68,999, for this Copilot+ PC. To that extent, the choice of a colourway called ‘atmospheric blue’ is surely a better pick that conventional black or grey hues. Quite portable at 1.34kg, while maximum thickness at 11mm is less than a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 smartphone when folded (that measures 12.1mm).
Performance, two sides to that coin
That price perspective makes HP’s choice of the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 chip, particularly surprising. It proved to be a better fit in a consumer-focused Copilot+ PC priced just around ₹1,25,990 which we’d reviewed recently, and to that end, the EliteBook Ultra G1q isn’t. Performance isn’t a compromise, but enterprise users would probably demand more for the sake of futureproofing – 16GB RAM and 1TB solid state storage helps keep moving things along swiftly. You’d not expect the least powerful among Snapdragon X Elite’s quartet, with slowest max multithread clock speeds and missing out on a dual boost core, in a flagship computing device.
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Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips have forced the Windows ecosystem to develop for the arm architecture, but there are still minor gaps being filled. For apps that natively support arm, performance really shined through. For most use cases, the EliteBook Ultra G1q is able to hold performance for most use cases – think a typical day at work, drowning in documents and PDFs, and rushing from one meeting to the other. However, performance will see a drop if you sustain strain this chip. The fan becomes noticeably audible, whilst the underside heating is perceptible.
Connectivity ports are limited to two USB-C, of which one has the 40Gbps Thunderbolt rating (the other’s limited to 10Gbps, alongside one USB-A port. Would you miss a card reader and an HDMI port?
HP’s unique, impressive AI envelope
HP’s somewhat unprecedented pitch is an AI Companion app, which becomes another AI tool at your fingertips alongside Microsoft’s Copilot. This uses OpenAI’s GPT-4o model, which means it is using the latest and the best there is. That is perhaps also its best argument, in the face of inevitable questions as to its need alongside Copilot. The toolkit is rather broad spectrum, with the chip’s neural processing unit (NPU) a core requirement for it to work (it cannot be installed in just any Windows PC). There is of course the “Ask” tool, which is similar to just any AI chatbot you may have used to find answers to the questions burning inside.
That’s where things become interesting. “Analyze” proves important if wish to summarise documents, curate key pointers from them or even compare between two documents (handy, if you need to identify changes). For now, document format support is for .pdf, .txt, and .docx which likely covers the bases for most users. The app provides the steps to create a library where the documents you wish to analyse, will reside. In our tests, we fed a bunch of PDF files (including the EliteBook Ultra G1q’s own spec sheet) as well as Word documents to summarise. Results were, I’d say, accurate to a rating of 8 out of 10. Key pointers and summaries are useful, but it often didn’t identify all differences (often, minor ones are missed) between two different versions of the same document.
I was quite interested in the “Perform” feature set. This works in the background, monitors system performance including storage space and battery metrics and can automatically step in if something needs to be corrected – an incorrectly configured software or an app that’s hogging the memory due to a faulty process being stuck, for example. It can check for, suggest and download relevant updates too, from time to time – though in our time testing the EliteBook Ultra G1q, no such update notifications popped up.
Another important element to HP’s AI layer is the Wolf Pro Security NGAV, or Next-Generation Antivirus as this new classification is also called as. If you have an HP laptop provided by your workplace, chances are you’d be familiar with its antivirus suite. This version on the Copilot+ PC ecosystem uses AI models to help detect malicious intent, be it an app behaving in a suspicious manner or the threat of potential malware putting the PC at risk. It is difficult to judge till an actual threat situation emerges, but the protective layer is reassuring.
Windows laptops stand up to Apple MacBooks
It must be noted that the EliteBook Ultra G1q has an immediately impressive 14-inch IPS display. It is nicely tuned for colours, quite vivid and well separated, without any elements of overbearing richness. This screen is quite bright too, and minimally reflective, a combination you’d really appreciate when warding off typically bright ceiling lighting that’s a common fixture in most offices. If you intend to do a spot of photo editing or watching some HDR (or high dynamic range) content, this screen does build those experiences on deep blacks.
That said, the 2240 x 1400 resolution is a bit of an outlier, particularly when you’d expect something closer to 2880 x 1800 for a 14-inch screen with the 16:10 aspect ratio. Nevertheless, this doesn’t result in softer sharpening – text is quite crisp and comfortable to read as do finer details emerge through from photos you’d be cropping in to on Lightroom. While this resolution may look odd on the spec sheet, the positive side to this is there are less pixels for the battery to illuminate.
That neatly leads me to the small matter of extremely impressive battery life. Really impressive. The sort of numbers that only the Apple MacBooks could return consistently thus far, and very few Windows laptops ever got close. The EliteBook Ultra G1q can get you through almost three days at work before the battery is down to 5% and you must charge again – that’s at 50% brightness, typical productivity focused workflows and an hour of daily video binging. Close to 25 hours on a single charge, when not strained, is impressive.
The EliteBooks may have traditionally appealed to HP’s enterprise and business users, but there’s enough transition with the EliteBook Ultra G1q to suggest its appeal now includes the consumer demographic too. The baseline Copilot+ PC specs are very much ticking off the checklist, but the proposition is heavily reliant on HP’s value additions – the AI powered anti-malware suite, and an AI companion built on OpenAI’s GPT-4o models. It does cost a pretty penny, but pieces in this jigsaw deliver value.