HP OmniBook 5 16 offers nothing special, but that's probably for the best

The OmniBook 5 16 is HP's budget 16-inch laptop designed for home multimedia purposes or students. Unlike pricier models from the Spectre or OmniBook 7 series, the OmniBook 5 16 skimps on HDR, Thunderbolt, high refresh rates, high resolutions, expandability, and other luxuries in order to focus on the basics.

The end result is a very respectable starter laptop that gets it right in terms of core functionality. Aspects like build quality, battery life, the typing experience, and no TN panels on any configuration are excellent for the price range. The lack of any advanced features mentioned above means the OmniBook 5 16 can start for as low as $660 while still offering a modern Core Ultra 7 255U Arrow Lake CPU.

Weaker aspects include graphics performance as the model is limited to the Core U-series and thus Arc 4 graphics only. Competing laptops with Lunar Lake-V like the Dell 16 Plus can offer much faster graphics performance by up to 80 to 90 percent not to mention faster NPU performance for Co-Pilot+ compatibility. If your workloads involve the occasional gaming and graphics editing, then you'll likely want to look beyond the budget OmniBook 5 16.

More details and benchmarks on the OmniBook 5 16 can be found on our full review of the device here.