Review Summary
Expert Rating
HP is one of the oldest PC/laptop brands in India, with a portfolio that spans all price ranges and use cases, from students to business professionals to amateur gamers and pro-gamers alike. HP offers something for everyone, and in a similar fashion, there’s the HP OmniBook 3. Priced under 70K, this laptop comes with an AMD Ryzen AI 5 processor, AMD Radeon GPU and a 1080P IPS anti-glare panel. Put simply, this is not for gamers nor for those who want to binge-watch their favourite shows in HDR back to back.
This is a no-nonsense laptop for productivity users who need a big display that’s visible under direct sunlight, a full-sized keyboard for those who need a numberpad, and smooth performance to handle most everyday tasks. So, accountants, students, working professionals, is this the right laptop for you? Let’s find out!
Table of Contents
Simple, Functional, and Minimal Design
Kicking things off with the design, we have a very minimal and traditional HP design. The lid of the laptop is Glacier Silver with the HP logo right in the middle. Lift the lid, and you are greeted with the 15.6-inch IPS display.
The hinge is strong with minimal wobble for the display. While the display doesn’t go back to 180 degrees, it goes far back enough to angle it for a comfortable experience. You can’t lift the lid with a single finger, and that is a shame. It isn’t a deal breaker, more a quality-of-life improvement, something we have seen on other similarly priced laptops.
Moving to the keyboard, it is a full-sized one with a number pad, great for those who do accounting/number crunching. I do maintain my expenses manually, and the addition of the number pad was just perfect for those quick additions and subtractions. For those of you who use the number pad often, you know its value!
The rest of the keyboard is fine. It is a little squishy to type on, and once I got used to it, it got the job done fine. I miss full-sized directional buttons, but that’s just me. All the keys do feel slightly small when you start typing on it (unless you are coming from a similar layout HP laptop), but you get used to them in about half a day.
The keyboard is backlit, and you have two brightness settings for the backlighting. The power button does not double up as a fingerprint reader. The fingerprint reader is located on the far right, below the ‘enter key’ of the dedicated number pad. Unlike other laptops, the power button isn’t located in the corner, but rather above the backspace. When it comes to security, the laptop supports Windows Hello and also comes with a physical shutter for the webcam.
Moving over to the trackpad, it is a staple budget HP, and that isn’t a bad thing. If you have used an HP laptop in the past, you will feel right at home. It is fairly large, smooth and supports the standard multitouch we have come to expect from modern Windows laptops. I personally switched off the physical right click and used the 2 fingers tap to right click, as the gestures and taps are precisely recognised on the laptop.
Overall, the build of the laptop is good, and it feels robust. The laptop feels sturdy with minimal flex in the body. The palmrest is also large and comfortable for long typing sessions, and the off-centre trackpad feels just right, something we have seen on other laptops with dedicated number pads.
Connectivity: Gets The Basics Right
Coming to the connectivity options, the left side of the laptop houses 1 USB-A port, an HDMI port and 1 USB-C port. It also has the headphone jack a little further away. This placement gives you a bit more space to lean back when using a wired headset. I used my HyperX Cloud II headphones, and one of the cons of that headset is the short 3.5mm cable. So a little wiggle room from the laptop goes a long way in “letting you lean back when wired in”, so to speak.
The right has the USB-A and power port. It’s good that the USB-C port supports power delivery, so you don’t need to carry the laptop charger with you wherever you go. That said, with USB-PD, I feel it is time thin and light laptops got rid of the dedicated power port altogether, but that’s just me. The base has rubber feet to keep the device elevated for good airflow when working on a desk.
Display: Not the Window into Pixel-Perfect Worlds
The display of the HO OmniBook 3 is great and a tad disappointing at the same time. Let me explain. When I worked on this laptop, it was a treat. The 15.6-inch display may not be 16:10, but it was big enough for me to have my spreadsheets, social media feed, documents and PPTs easily visible. The anti-glare display meant that I could sit under direct light and not be bothered. While the display isn’t the brightest I’ve seen, it got the job done well under some sunlight, too.
So what’s the problem? Well, it is a 6-bit panel, so the colours do tend to look washed out. And the viewing angles aren’t great – and that’s saying something for an IPS display. Now, granted, the narrow viewing angles can be good for those who don’t want nosy people peeping into their laptops. But when I was playing the latest trailer for Fantastic Four in the office with a few people, a lot of them complained. So your mileage will vary based on your desire for privacy, vs huddling around the laptop for movie night. When I was alone with the display, I didn’t mind it. It won’t make Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse pop, but it got the job done for a few episodes of Netflix’s Sena.
Audio: Meant for Conversations
Moving over to the sound output, the laptop has 2 bottom-firing speakers, and when kept on a table, they sound good. The beauty of this device is that it is targeted towards productivity users, so video calls and content that are dialogue-heavy (such as lectures, tutorials, etc) sound really good. I was on a few work video calls, and the dialogue clarity was good.
Sticking with video calls, special shoutout to the camera that does a great job of capturing you in frame, even if there is a light source behind you (like a window). The mic, too, is great at catching your audio and, through AI, helps reduce and in some cases eliminate background noise for a seamless productivity experience. These are definitely plus points for the productivity and education-centric use cases.
Coming back to the speakers, they can get loud, and you can enjoy the occasional movie on them, but don’t expect the mixed audio of an action-packed film to blow you away. Documentaries, on the other hand, are engaging, once again, thanks to the voice-focused tuning of the speakers.
Performance and Battery Life: Ryzen Impresses
I’ve already highlighted above that, for productivity, the laptop works very well. So let’s jump into some synthetic benchmarks and see how this laptop performs against some of its peers.
Below is a look at some synthetic benchmarks of the HP OmniBook 3, which is powered by the AMD Ryzen AI 5 340, compared to similarly priced laptops, including the Lenovo Ideapad Slim 5x powered by the Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100, the ASUS Expertbook P1 powered by the Intel Core i7-13620H and the ASUS Vivobook 16 powered by the Intel Core Ultra 5 225H.
As you can see, the AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 performs well on paper when compared to the competition. It steals the show in Cinebench R23 Single Thread but falls slightly short of the pack leader, the Intel Core Ultra 5 225H, in multi-thread performance. It stands tall among its peers in PCMark 10, GeekBench 6 ST, highlighting its single-core performance, but is in the middle in GeekBench 6 MT and PCMark 10 Extended. In our AI benchmark, too, the laptop performed quite well, although we are waiting to test more AI laptops before reaching any conclusion on a laptop’s AI capabilities.
| Model Number | Lenovo Ideapad Slim 5x | ASUS Expertbook P1 | ASUS Vivobook 16 | HP OmniBook 3 |
| Cinebench R23 MT | 8011 | 10118 | 13297 | 11031 |
| Cinebench R23 ST | 1097 | 1822 | 1811 | 1906 |
| PCMark 10 | NA | 6044 | 6966 | 6797 |
| PCMark 10 Extended | NA | 5548 | 6524 | 6081 |
| Geek Bench 6 ST | 2379 | 2559 | 2650 | 2784 |
| Geek Bench 6 MT | 11511 | 11483 | 11158 | 10606 |
| Geek Bench OpenCL | 9628 | 12802 | 23677 | 13298 |
| Geek Bench Vulcan | 13950 | 15805 | 26818 | 20565 |
| CPU - ONNX - Single Precision | 1967 | 3073 | 3671 | 2815 |
| CPU - ONNX - Half Precision | 3167 | 1310 | 1621 | 1595 |
| CPU - ONNX - Quantised Score | 6320 | 5467 | 6275 | 7152 |
| CPU - OpenVINO - Single Precision | NA | 4055 | 3864 | 3755 |
| CPU - OpenVINO - Half Precision | NA | 3890 | 3219 | 3829 |
| CPU - OpenVINO - Quantised Score | NA | 9388 | 9773 | 10851 |
| 3DMark Time Spy Extreme | 520 | 730 | 1226 | 944 |
| 3DMark Time Spy | 1068 | 1575 | 2639 | 2035 |
| 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra | 916 | 1105 | 1509 | 1333 |
| 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme | 1755 | 2194 | 2698 | 2507 |
| 3DMark Fire Strike | 3641 | 4411 | 5290 | 4902 |
| 3DMark Night Raid | 16859 | 18103 | 21717 | 21029 |
In PC Mark Battery, the HP OmniBook 3 lasted shy of 8 hours, which isn't great when you compare it to similarly priced devices that touch or even cross 10 hours in the same test conditions.
Moving over to real-world performance, I got through my workday without resorting to the charger. This was a typical 8-9 hour workday with a few Google Meet calls, emails, working on some content, checking videos, etc., with some YouTube and Netflix thrown into the mix.
We also tried GTA V and Valorant on the laptop to see how well it works for casual gaming, and the device did not disappoint. We recorded an average of 41 FPS in GTA V and 224 FPS in Valorant at 1080p. Just to be clear, this isn't a gaming laptop. That being said, the iGPU does show signs of sufficing for casual gaming on the side.
Verdict
The HP OmniBook 3 find itself in the crowded space of laptops priced between 65K to 70K. Whether this is the right laptop for you depends on your use case. If you need a workhorse with a large display to take video calls, listen to online lectures/meetings, and productivity is more important to you, then you can consider it. The full-sized keyboard works well with the dedicated number pad, and the laptop has good everyday performance for the price. The laptop is well-built, too. The anti-glare display is good for outdoor use, albeit at the cost of good viewing angles. The colour reproduction of the display definitely could have been better. If the colour volume and punchy display are what you want, then you are better off looking elsewhere, as you can even get an OLED display in this price range. My only gripe is that the overall battery life of the device could have been better, especially when you compare it to competing laptops in the price range.
Editor's Rating: 7 / 10
Pros:
- Good performance for everyday use
- Good speakers and a webcam for meetings/learning
- Nice design and good build quality
- Anti-glare display works well
Cons:
- Colour reproduction could have been better
- Battery life could have been better