HP Elitebook Ultra G1i Review

Design and Keyboard

• Lovely blue colourway
• Slim stature leads to port compromises
• Snappy keyboard and lovely trackpad

The Elitebook Ultra G1i is a fetching customer in its dark blue colourway that’s a pleasant change from the usual sea of black and grey in the business laptop world, and reminds me of the Midnight colourway Apple has for modern MacBook Airs, although it seems to induce less fingerprints.

HP says this laptop is made from up to 90% recycled magnesium in the chassis, which not only helps the environment but also makes this laptop strong and lightweight. It tips the scales at just 1.19kg, making it extremely portable and easy to put into a bag to take to meetings on your travels.

At just 12.1mm thick at its thickest point, the Elitebook Ultra G1i is also quite a slim laptop, lessening its profile in your bag. As with some other ultrabooks, though, that has had the unfortunate effect of compromising its set of ports. The left side has a Thunderbolt 4-capable USB-C port and a full-size USB-A that’s obscured by an Ethernet-style port cover. On the right, you’ll find two more Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports. It seems HP has gone full-on 2016 Apple.

The keyboard here, owing to the more compact chassis, is a 65% one with the addition of arrow keys in the bottom corner and a function row in a lighter blue colour for contrast. It’s a short and snappy keyboard that I enjoyed using with the Elitebook Ultra G1i as my main work laptop, and is also backlit if you want to use it after dark – the white underglow isn’t the strongest, though.

The Elitebook Ultra G1i’s trackpad is huge, and one of the biggest I’ve seen on a laptop in its size class. It’s also silky smooth to use and is lovely and responsive for gesture controls and general navigation.

Display and Sound

• Gorgeous OLED screen
• Brilliant colours, black level and contrast
• Tinnier speakers

As for its screen, HP has bundled the Elitebook Ultra G1i with a solid 14-inch 2.8K (2880×1800) 120Hz OLED panel that provides a detailed and responsive experience with excellent clarity and generally crisp and responsive images.

This is also backed up by my colorimeter, which measured deep blacks and excellent contrast with 0.03 and 9250:1 results, respectively. In addition, the 6600K colour temperature is also right where it should be, giving content lots of depth and pop.

A peak SDR brightness of 382.1 nits makes this laptop suitable for indoor and outdoor use, and there is a decent punch to on-screen action. The only caveat to that is this is a horrendously glossy display, which might not be the best for taking your work into the great outdoors at times.

As is typical with OLEDs, colour accuracy is particularly excellent, with perfect 100% of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 gamuts, as well as 94% Adobe RGB. This makes this display a marvellous choice for mainstream and creative workloads.

The Elitebook Ultra G1i’s speakers aren’t too brilliant, with a tinnier and thinner sound from the downwards-firing units that are fitted to this laptop. They can get plenty loud, though.

Performance

• Core Ultra 7 258V provides solid performance
• Good graphical horsepower
• Decently quick and capacious SSD

HP hasn’t sprung any real surprises with the power station inside the Elitebook Ultra G1i, opting for a tried-and-tested Intel Core Ultra 7 258V that seems to be a popular choice for these smaller ultrabooks. 

The eight core/eight thread chip has also made its way into the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition, while you can also find this chip’s brother, the 256V, inside the Galaxy Book 5 Pro from Samsung, for instance.

With this, it provides some solid potency in both day-to-day working, feeling brisk and responsive, and in our suite of benchmark tests. It performs well in Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23, especially on the single core front, although the lack of hyperthreading hampers performance in multi-threaded loads.

The Arc 140V iGPU with this chip also means graphical horsepower is solid, and makes this laptop better-suited for more intensive or creative tasks where that horsepower is integral, such as for video editing or rendering work. Competing Qualcomm laptops in a similar price range have scores that are worse than half of the Elitebook Ultra G1i in the 3DMark Time Spy test.

My sample came with 32GB of fast DDR5 RAM to give plenty of headroom for both intense multi-tasking or fiddlier workloads, while there is also a 1TB SSD inside for a good capacity of local files. With reads and writes of 6596.30MB/s and 4926.42MB/s respectively, it’s a decently brisk one, too.

Software

• Little bloatware in Windows 11
• Some HP-specific apps
• Copilot+ PC functionality is here

The Elitebook Ultra G1i comes running full-fat Windows 11, and with a decently clean install, too. There isn’t much in the way of additional bloatware or unneeded third-party software, although you will find some HP-specific apps to greet you on startup.

Chief among these is MyHP, which is their catch-all system app where you can check on vitals such as system utilisation and configure settings such as power modes and energy optimisation. There is also HP’s own AI Companion nestled in the taskbar, along with the Support Assistant app for troubleshooting.

As well as having HP’s software, this is a Copilot+ PC, so it comes with Microsoft’s usual AI gubbins built into Windows, such as generative powers and filters in the Photos and Paint app, as well as the clever Windows Studio webcam effects for background blurring, auto framing and maintaining eye contact.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 15 hours 48 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for two working days

The Elitebook Ultra G1i features a decent-sized 64Whr cell, which is quite good considering how slender and portable the chassis is. Combined with the efficiency of the Lunar Lake chip inside, it should result in some truly excellent battery life.

In running the PCMark 10 battery test at the requisite 150 nits of brightness, this HP laptop lasted for 15 hours and 48 minutes. That puts it right into the mix against this laptop’s key rivals, such as the Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro, which lasted for 15 minutes or so less. It’s also two hours longer than the similarly priced Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6. The much pricier Dell Pro 14 Premium will give you several more hours away from the mains, though.

As for charging speeds, the Elitebook Ultra G1i with its supplied 65W brick, took 48 minutes to get to 50%, while a full charge took 5 minutes shy of two hours. That’s an okay result, if unremarkable.

Should you buy it?