HP EliteBook X G2q 14 review: Is It Finally Snapdragon’s Time To Shine

Is it finally the time for ARM-on-Windows to shine bright? That’s the question I’ve been grappling with after my two weeks with HP’s EliteBook XG2q 14 AI laptop. It features Qualcomm’s  Snapdragon X2 Elite chip, along with the Qualcomm Adreno X2-90 GPU. The review unit I got was paired with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD. 

Pretty stacked for a laptop, if you aren’t a gamer, I must say. I’ve been using Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops since day 1, and they’ve gotten way better since then. Initially, it was all about efficiency and battery life.

They ploughed through a day’s work without breaking a sweat. Intel and AMD, though, came out swinging and launched new chips with stellar battery life. 

While HP has done some remarkable work with respect to the hardware and build quality of the laptop, I think it boils down to the chip, the ARM-on-Windows issues (yes, even after two years there are still some lingering issues) and whether or not you want to spend upwards of Rs 2,50,000 on this laptop.

With cheaper alternatives available, the question gets quite difficult to answer. For now, let’s start off with what I really liked about this laptop. 

The goodies 

The design is quite minimal, professional-looking, and elegant. The laptop may look familiar, and that’s because it isn’t trying to be anything out of the ordinary. HP has gone for something thoughtful rather than flashy.

This is a laptop aimed at professionals, mainly, and hence this thinking behind the design. The one thing I personally didn’t like was the glossy HP logo on the lid.

Other than that, I can’t really fault the design. The build quality, with the laptop made from magnesium, is solid and the hinge (there’s minimal wobble) is very sturdy. HP says that the device has undergone eleven MIL-STD 810H tests. 

Let’s move on to the display, which can go all the way back to a 180-degree angle. I both loved the display, and also, had a issue with it.

The display is sharp, vibrant, and the text is crisp. I’m always team 16:10 aspect ratio, as its great for productivity, and it is very much worth it in laptops targetted at professionals. It’s good for scrolling through long documents, or even reading via the Kindle app.

I was using the laptop to do some light photo editing and viewing the edited photos in full screen was a treat. 

While I won’t dive deep into them, let me just tell you that the top-firing speakers were a pleasant surprise.

The sound was clear, instead of being muffled, and for light and casual movies, I was alright with using these in-built speakers rather than my go-to external ones. It does get quite loud as well without being too distorted, so that’s a plus point as well. 

It’s time to talk shop. The Snapdragon X2 Elite chipset. The changes may seem minimal, compared to the previous version of this chip, but over the course of two weeks I realised just how good Snapdragon chips have gotten.

Any task you throw at it will be taken care of with aplomb. Even if you push it to the limit, you won’t notice any hiccups.

Yes, there was some lag while using Google Chrome, but that’s the case with most laptops I’ve been testing over the past couple of years. 

The CPU performs admirably well, the heat dissipation is equally spread out, and what surprised me the most is that I could casually game on this laptop. 

What you’re mostly buying this laptop for is the efficiency in battery life. For the most part of my review period I had forgotten where the charger was kept. This was for two reasons.

One, I have a ton of GaN chargers lying around and it juices up the laptop in pretty quick time.

The other reason is because battery life has taken a real step forward. I easily got through a workday, some YouTube videos thereafter, a million Google Chrome tabs and some light photo editing with 25 percent battery left.

The ARM processor has some killer gains with resepct to battery efficiency. 

With this laptop, you also get the latest of Microsoft’s AI features that run on the NPU. I’m going to highlight just one, the one I liked the most: Click to Do. With this you can interact with all the content on the screen and summarise it, copy it, and a lot more. 

What I’m Not A Fan Of 

Ports: The laptop is a little light on the ports given the price tag. There’s a USB-C port, an HDMI port and a headphone/mic combo jack on the left-hand side. The right side features a USB-A port, a USB-C port and a Kensington lock. There’s no SD card slot to be found, which would have been a nice addition. 

Display: I’d much rather pick the OLED panel over the IPS option even though it eats into the battery life. While the IPS panel is easy on the eyes, and works in a number of different lighting conditions, there is a colour shift issue at certain angles. Sudden changes in brightness, and I think the matte screen works against it in this case. 

Verdict: Worth the money? 

I didn’t mention about the keyboard of trackpad as those were just fine and let me do my job without any issues. But my overall question is about whether the Snapdragon chips deliver or not. 

Yes, there are still some tethering issues with ARM-on-Windows, but HP has done everything it could with respect to the hardware side of things.

The other end of the equation is the smattering of laptops that you can get for a lower price including the Galaxy Book6 Pro, the Dell XPS 14 and a lot of ASUS laptops. 

For upwards of Rs 2,50,000, you need to think twice before giving your hard earned in exchange for this laptop.

I liked the hardware quite a bit, and the software issues can easily be fixed with an array of updates. I commend HP for trying to build a maximalist laptop for the enterprise user, but I really wish the pricing was more aggressive.