HP Elitebook Ultra G1i review: quality across the board

When terms like “elite” are employed, an alarm sounds. Are we dealing with a boring business laptop? The HP Elitebook Ultra G1i on review here may have half an eye on the well-heeled business travelling elite. But this is also just a great ultraportable laptop for anyone.

Well, anyone with money. One of our few major bugbears about the HP Elitebook Ultra G1i is the base model only has 256GB storage. I was juggling storage space from day one. And while that’s because of all the test software we use, this kind of storage at this price isn't really on.

That said, the HP Elitebook Ultra G1i is just wonderful for travel use. It’s petite, has a great screen, a potentially surprising amount of power and decent – if not quite world-beating – inputs (translation: the keyboard and touchpad).

Price & Availability

You’ll pay £1319 for the base Elitebook Ultra G1i model reviewed here, or up to £1631 if you want 32GB RAM and 512GB storage.

That translates to a $1,389 starting price in the USA, or from AU$2,499 in Australia. Increased specifications naturally raise those asking prices.

Design

The HP Elitebook Ultra G1i is a very light, thin and not-too-large laptop. It has a 14-inch screen, casting it in the same role as the MacBook Air, at least before that series branched out with a larger 15-inch version.

You also get a super-desirable combo of a strong, rigid feel and low weight. The Elitebook Ultra G1i weighs 1.19kg. And I can’t imagine it could get much lighter without making some obvious compromises to that strong impression. Sub-1kg is nice, but it isn’t everything.

The laptop's entire outer casing is metal, and the screen is covered by edge-to-edge glass. This is a very classy design.

But to avoid it looking too generic, HP has gone for a two-tone (well, three-tone) keyboard, with a lighter row of function keys and a much lighter power button. That button is a fingerprint reader too.

Those little hints of deviation from the super-light laptop blueprint don’t extend to the connections. The HP Elitebook Ultra G1i has two just USB-C connectors. That’s it, bar the 3.5mm headphone/mic socket.

Display

The HP Elitebook Ultra G1i has a 14-inch 16:10 screen, of a fairly high 2880 x 1800 pixel resolution. It’s an OLED panel with the usual excellent colour and contrast that brings.

Brightness tops out at around 570 nits according to my testing, or around 400 nits with normal use. This is nothing special, the norm for today’s OLED laptops really. It doesn’t reach the kind of searing brightness of one of Apple’s Mini-LED MacBook Pro screens, but few things do.

There’s more than enough brightness on tap for indoors, you can get by outside, and the combo of a glass top and OLED image quality is a real feast for the eyes.

This is also a 120Hz display, for smoother motion than a classic 60Hz laptop. Nothing the HP Elitebook Ultra G1i offers is out of the ordinary, but it’s yet more proof that while this is mainly a business laptop, it doesn’t really lag behind the style-led PCs.

The screen even folds back a full 180 degrees for easy screen sharing, which is handy.

Keyboard & Touchpad

The HP Elitebook Ultra G1i continues the trend for fashion PC-matching style with the keyboard. At first you notice the lighter row of function keys above the main key crew.

This is purely for the look, for a little visual diversity, as they are otherwise entirely normal keys. No Dell XPS touch-button silliness here. Several of HP’s most recent models adopt this style.

Right at the end of this row sits an even lighter power button, and this one doubles as a fingerprint reader.

The keyboard itself is fairly similar to Apple’s MacBook style, but with a few differences. HP’s is less clicky, leading to a slightly mellower feel. This typically pairs well with a deeper key action, which the Elitebook doesn’t have.

However, after thousands of words or so of typing away, I was firmly bedded in. A little more substance would go a long way here, but unless you are literally going to spend all day typing, the Elitebook Ultra G1i keyboard has easily good-enough key feel to keep you happy.

The Elitebook Ultra G1i touchpad is a bit more of an unusual case. This is a haptic pad, meaning the feel of the click is provided by a little motor rather than an actual moving pad depressing to set off a click mechanism.

This style, pioneered by Apple a decade ago, lets you use every tiny bit of the pad, with no clicker dead zones and a consistent feel throughout. The G1i’s pad also has a solidly potent clicker feel.

One of the pitfalls of the early Windows laptop haptic pads was that many of them just weren’t powerful enough, making the click seem super-weak.

That’s not an issue in the Elitebook Ultra G1i, but the clicker also feels a bit too much like a vibration motor let off for a very short burst rather than a fully convincing haptic 'click'. HP could do with improving the fidelity of its haptics for future generations.

That aside, the pad is great – a smooth and large plate of glass.

Performance

This kind of laptop seems ripe for one of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AI processors, which are great but not necessarily ideal for the hardcore crowd, thanks to lingering compatibility issues. But instead, the Elitebook Ultra G1i has a more familiar Intel Ultra 7 256V, paired with 16GB RAM and a 256GB SSD.

And here’s where my beef with the Elitebook Ultra G1i enters the frame. I have the base version of this laptop. It costs a lot and yet only has 256GB storage. On day one of testing, storage space became an issue.

There is a 512GB version of the Elitebook Ultra G1i, but it's pricier still, of course. In no way is it acceptable to be shipping laptops at this price with so little storage in 2025. It doesn’t make sense.

Thankfully, the rest does. A second-gen Intel Ultra brings great overall performance with surprisingly good gaming power, thanks to integrated Intel Arc 140V graphics. The HP manages to reach an average of 40fps at Medium settings in Cyberpunk at 1080p resolution, for gaming and graphics chops you would – not long ago – need a low-end dedicated graphics card.

I've seen no obvious signs of unusual heat-related performance throttling here either, showing what a well-balanced computer the Elitebook Ultra G1i is. Well, aside from my gripe about the storage.

It’s responsive, quiet when you only need to do light work, and has enough power on tap for far more, including a decent 47 TOPS NPU for AI jobs.

Battery Life

That balance plays out in battery life too. Compared to Intel chipsets of a couple of generations ago, the Elitebook Ultra G1i’s Intel Ultra 7 256V has fantastic efficiency for lower-demand jobs.

According to my testing, it can last up to 14 hours and 50 minutes of light work. You can certainly find longer-lasting laptops with this processor, because the Elitebook Ultra G1i’s battery is only a mid-size 64Wh unit. But, once again, it’s all about balance. This is a solid ultraportable battery capacity, and HP no doubt was keen to keep the weight below the 1.2kg mark.

HP goes well beyond the norm with the Elitebook Ultra G1i's webcam. This is a 9MP camera. And instead of using that extra resolution for a super-wide view to crop into, this one has a more conventional field of view, but can shoot video at 4K resolution.

While you’re not going to suddenly feel like you have a DSLR pointed at you during those Teams and Zoom meetings, I did notice the above-average dynamic range and detail here, before even clocking the camera resolution.

For folks much more interested in the Elitebook Ultra G1i as a do-it-all dream ultraportable than an exec’s laptop, I do think the speakers could be better though.

Their sound quality is solid enough, mind, and the way the drivers throw out audio makes music and movies sound wider than the laptop itself is welcome. But next to the best, the Elitebook just doesn’t quite have the volume, and certainly doesn’t have the bass power, to compete.

HP Elitebook Ultra G1i review: Verdict

Quality across the board. That’s the HP Elitebook Ultra G1i’s style. You get low weight and awesome portability with no obvious compromises to the build.

Battery life is long for office work-type jobs, yet there’s power for plenty more, too. The Elitebook doesn’t look boring either, despite the buttoned-up-sounding name.

A few elements could still improve, though. As is so often the case, this Windows laptop’s speakers and touchpad aren’t quite a match for Apple’s. But the only major sting here is the storage spec.

Overall, the HP Elitebook Ultra G1i is a business-traveller laptop that deserves attention from the wider audience of ultraportable shoppers. It’s top-quality throughout.

Also Consider

Apple’s MacBook Air comes across a bit of a bargain next to the HP. The 512GB storage edition still costs less, and it has an even higher-resolution webcam. But you don’t get an OLED screen with Apple, or the super-punchy Mini-LED screens of the MacBook Pro line. Apple’s touchpad is significantly better, though.

Dell’s closest alternative is the Dell XPS 13, which again costs a bit less, while also using a somewhat more ordinary (if good-quality) LCD display. Dell’s touchpad is even more contentious than HP’s too, as it’s just an invisible part of the section below the keyboard.

One of the few that can out-spend the HP is the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which for years has been business laptop royalty. Some folks just can’t get enough of that chunky ThinkPad keyboard, even if it is watered down compared to the olden days designs.