Windows business laptops and sleekness usually don’t go hand in hand until you come across HP EliteBook X G1i. The best feature of the laptop is its battery life without sacrificing performance. It will last through a full day of work and then some. Plus, it comes with some helpful AI features.

Visual delight

There is a 14-inch LCD touch panel that is almost glare-free because of the matte finish. Yet, viewing angles are excellent, and you don’t sacrifice colours when looking at the display from the side.

Being a fan of matte finish, this easily wins the heart. Glare from the lights in a room can easily ruin one’s workflow. The 16:10 screen is responsive, while the anti-glare coating reduces visible smudges from skin oils.

Weighing approximately 1.2kg, this device features enough ports to cater to all your office needs. On the left, you get HDMI 2.1, two Thunderbolt 4s, and a headphone/microphone combo jack. On the other side is one USB-C port and one USB Type-A. It always helps to have enough Thunderbolt 4 ports, especially if you have a lot of data to transfer. It’s equally convenient to have ports on both sides.

The keyboard is well-designed and makes typing a comfortable experience. Picture: Mathures Paul

The keyboard is well spread out with full-size keys and excellent key travel. The trackpad, too, is sufficiently large with ample room on the palm rest. It’s good to see HP retain Page Up and Page Down buttons squished in with the arrow keys, besides the inclusion of Home (on the F12 key) and dedicated End, Insert, and Delete keys in the top right corner of the keyboard. The keycaps don’t offer too much contour, but there is the right degree of resistance to help with tactility. All these things add up to boost typing accuracy. There is a single sign-on with the fingerprint sensor integrated into the power button for added convenience.

In the design department, HP has aimed for simplicity. The machine has just about enough curves. Coming back to the display, the bezels are narrow except for the one on the top because it houses the web camera, which has a privacy shutter.

Even after accommodating all the ports, HP has managed to keep the machine fairly slim, say to the point of the thickness of a micro screwdriver. Overall, the machine is sturdy, with minimal flex in the keyboard deck or display.

Even though this is more of a business laptop, it can pump out plenty of bass and loudness through a quad-speaker setup. Hitting 50 per cent volume would be sufficient in most cases, but if you want the entire room to hear, amp it up without worrying about distortion. The speakers deliver depth, and the sound is sufficiently clean.

What could have been superior for the pricing is a better camera than a 5MP snapper, though it offers support for Windows Hello.

Snappy performer

Powering the machine is an Intel Core Ultra 7 286V processor with 32GB RAM. When it comes to video editing, it’s a significantly faster machine compared to what you get on most Windows laptops.

Usually, slim form factors offer low-power chips. That’s not the case here. There is strong single-core performance, which can help with the most demanding tasks, but, at the same time, the machine conserves energy.

The 32GB memory comes in handy for multitasking, especially AI-related features. Coming with the laptop are a number of AI components — AI Content Extraction, AI Image Search, AI Phil Silica, and AI Semantic Analysis. We tried to generate content ideas for social media marketing and develop a sustainability strategy. The answers were surprisingly good.

Given the powerful processor, editing short videos went like a breeze. Plus, it took care of all office-related work. The processor can offer up to 48 TOPS of NPU performance.

In graphics performance, Intel has regained quite a lot of ground it had lost to AMD. The performance is more than respectable but slightly behind the curve compared to AMD.

Make the call

From an office laptop, we need enough battery life, and that’s what we got — around 20-21 hours of offline video playback and easily 12-13 hours of office work. Overall, HP EliteBook X G1i makes horsepower meet respectable battery life. It’s clearly a machine for productivity with some gaming thrown in.

At a glance

Device: HP EliteBook X G1i

Price: ₹149,750

High notes

Compact and lightweight

Excellent battery life

Comes with a number of AI features

Sturdy chassis

Room-filling sound

Muffled note

Webcam quality could have been better