HP EliteBook 6 G1q review: 5G outshines the rest of this laptop

The HP EliteBook 6 G1q is a 14-inch Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptop with a killer feature: Integrated 5G connectivity. HP Go is a built-in eSIM solution that delivers multi-network 5G connectivity, so it connects to AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile. It automatically switches depending on which one has the best signal, and you never even have to think about it.

It’s a magical experience being able to set up a laptop without connecting it to Wi-Fi, taking it with you in a bag, and taking it out of your bag to use it wherever you want without connecting to Wi-Fi or tethering it to your phone. Being able to pull the laptop out of my bag — in downtown Boston, at the beach, or wherever else — and have an immediate internet connection immediately was magical.

The HP Go 5G experience delivers five stars. This first version is mainly aimed at businesses. HP implied it might be looking to deliver more consumer laptops in the future when I asked.

Unfortunately, the rest of the laptop experience here doesn’t stand out. Our review model had a lower-end Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus chip and a webcam that looked grainy. And the display is on the dim side, which is a real problem for a 5G laptop you may want to use outdoors.

The HP EliteBook 6 G1q is a 14-inch business laptop available in a wide variety of configurations with different Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors. Our review model had a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 CPU. The model we reviewed is available from CDW for $1,695.

HP also has a configurator where you can configure options, including buying models without 5G and choosing higher-end Snapdragon processors, but it gets expensive fast. Since this is a business laptop, businesses buying fleets of PCs might end up negotiating pricing closer to the CDW model.

Thanks to the Qualcomm Snapdragon hardware, these are all Copilot+ PCs with a fast enough NPU to run the AI features Microsoft is adding to Windows.

The HP EliteBook 6 G1q is a lightweight silver laptop made of a mix of aluminum and plastic, and HP is proud that it includes recycled materials. At 3.17 pounds, this 14-inch laptop isn’t heavy, but it’s not the lightest laptop either. Some thin-and-light laptop designs would shave off a half pound or more here.

The build quality is good but not fancy. This is a business laptop through and through: A design made for corporations to buy in bulk for their employees, not to buy as a premium one-off machine for the CEO. It’s a solid design with a hinge that feels good, and it feels sturdy.

But it doesn’t feel like a premium all-metal machine: When I run my fingers over the edges of the laptop — down from the keyboard tray, over the ports, and then to the underbody, I can feel the edge of where the aluminum keyboard deck meets the plastic bottom. It’s not going to cut me or anything, but every time I pick up the machine, I can feel that metal-meets-plastic feeling. In summary: It’s a workhorse, and not a premium machine. A more premium design would be lighter and have a unibody construction without a seam you could feel.

The keyboard and trackpad on the HP EliteBook 6 G1q are serviceable. Since this is a 14-inch machine, there’s plenty of space for a large keyboard. The chiclet-style keys don’t feel mushy, but they don’t exactly feel snappy either. Key travel is a little low. That’s a tad disappointing for a business laptop, where keyboards are usually a focus.

The trackpad is also fine. It’s a good size and smooth enough, but it’s not the kind of premium glass surface you’ll find on higher-end business machines. Our review model didn’t have a touch screen, only a few configurations of this laptop do.

This is the kind of business laptop a company can hand out to its employees and know they’ll be able to work everywhere, but not the kind of business laptop an individual seeks out for the best typing experience.

The HP EliteBook 6 G1q has a display that does the job in indoor lighting conditions, but it doesn’t go above and beyond. It’s a 14-inch 1920×1200 IPS panel running at 60Hz and delivering up to 400 nits of brightness. That’s not going to win any awards, but I’m grateful I had the 400 nit display: HP also sells configurations with a dimmer 300 nit panel!

For a 5G laptop, I’d say this is a real problem. The ideal 5G laptop would let me work from anywhere, whether that’s at the beach or on a park bench in downtown Boston (I tested both.) At 400 nits of brightness, this panel doesn’t have enough brightness to compete with the sun on a bright day, making it near unusable in many lighting situations. Many laptops like that, but a 5G laptop — where the goal is to use it on the go — really deserves a brighter panel than this.

The speakers have enough volume, but they didn’t wow me, either. I test all the laptops I review by firing up Spotify and playing both Steely Dan’s Aja and Daft Punk’s Get Lucky. The sound is a little muffled and muddy. Instrument separation in Aja wasn’t particularly clear and bass in Get Lucky wasn’t particularly distinct. These speakers are usable in a pinch, but you’d definitely want headphones for music and media.

The HP EliteBook 6 G1q has a 1080p webcam, which sounds good on paper. But the webcam was incredibly grainy and washed out in non-ideal lighting, which is a disappointment for a business machine, where nicer webcams are often a feature. It did better in brighter lighting, but it’s not up there with many higher-end business laptop webcams.

HP includes a physical webcam shutter switch you can slide to block the webcam, which is always nice to see.

The microphone sounds reasonably clear with good noise cancellation. I’d say it’s better than the webcam, but neither are particularly impressive. If you need to be visible and audible in an online meeting, this machine will do the job. But it won’t deliver high recording quality.

Our review model had a fingerprint reader for Windows Hello on the keyboard deck. It worked fine. But an IR camera for facial recognition would’ve been a nice option — it does appear like that is an option on some other configurations.

The HP EliteBook 6 G1q’s connectivity is its crown jewel. 5G just worked out of the box: I powered on the laptop, set up Windows, and started using the machine without ever connecting it to Wi-Fi or plugging in an Ethernet cable. This also enables better management of a laptop fleet. If a laptop is stolen or lost, a business can track and locate it even if it isn’t connected to Wi-Fi. From an end-user perspective, I never bothered configuring anything. It “just worked” and switched between networks as needed. At a starting price of $19 per user per month for the 5G service, that’s extremely impressive.

This machine also has a lot of ports: On the left side, two USB Type-C (40Gbps) ports, one USB Type-A port (5Gbps), HDMI 2.1 out, and a combo audio jack. On the right side, a second USB Type-A port (5Gbps), an RJ-45 Ethernet jack, a security lock slot, and an optional nano SIM slot for models with cellular connectivity.

This machine has both Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. So the connectivity is incredible: Multi-network 5G, Wi-Fi 7, and wired Ethernet all in one machine.

The HP EliteBook 6 G1q ran cool and quiet, delivering reasonable desktop performance. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 hardware here is some of the slowest hardware HP could choose, however. It’s the slowest Snapdragon X Plus chip you’ll find. The only thing slower is the Snapdragon X X1-26-100, which doesn’t even get a “Plus” in its name. It does the job for basic productivity tasks: A web browser, office tools, and communication apps.

As always, we ran the EliteBook 6 G1q through our standard benchmarks to see how it performs. We normally start with PCMark 10, but it doesn’t yet run on Arm laptops like this one.

First, we run Cinebench R24. It’s available as a native Arm program, which lets us compare performance across laptops. CPUs with more cores do better on this multi-threaded benchmark. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 is an eight-core CPU, so it won’t keep up with CPUs with more cores on multithreaded tasks.

With a multi-threaded score of 759, the CPU here was definitely behind AMD’s Ryzen AI HX 300 series hardware, but it delivers better performance than many lower-tier power-efficient Intel chips.

Second, we run a graphical benchmark. This isn’t a gaming laptop, but it’s still good to check how the GPU performs. We run 3DMark Time Spy, a graphical benchmark that focuses on GPU performance. This particular benchmark is written for traditional x86 versions of Windows and runs through the Prism translation layer, so you’ll get an idea of how traditional GPU-accelerated apps (and games) will perform on this machine.

With a 3DMark Time Spy score of 1,066, this machine just isn’t suitable for GPU-accelerated workloads or gaming. Even the Qualcomm Hexagon GPUs in higher-tier Snapdragon X SKUs are significantly faster.

We also run 3DMark Night Raid. This benchmark does have a native Arm version, so we can compare the Qualcomm Hexagon GPU here and see how fast it runs when it isn’t being held back by the Prism translation layer here. The score here gives you an idea of how well the GPU will perform in apps written for Arm hardware.

With a score of 16,819 on the Night Raid benchmark, this machine closes some of the gap with Intel and AMD systems. The translation layer isn’t slowing things down, but it’s still far behind other machines in GPU performance.

Overall, the HP EliteBook 6 G1q we reviewed delivers serviceable performance for lightweight desktop PC tasks while running cool and quiet. But it’s no speed demon, and it will be quickly outpaced even by laptops with higher-end Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite CPUs.

The HP EliteBook 6 G1q has a 56 Watt-hour battery. That’s low for a laptop that weighs over three pounds. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus hardware here is power-efficient, so it’ll get you through a workday. But I didn’t see the kind of extremely long battery life — 24 hours — that I did on Snapdragon X laptops with larger batteries.

To benchmark the battery life, we play a 4K copy of Tears of Steel on repeat on Windows 11 with airplane mode enabled until the laptop suspends itself. We set the screen to 250 nits of brightness for our battery benchmarks. This is a best-case scenario for any laptop since local video playback is so efficient, and real battery life in day-to-day use is always going to be less than this.

The HP EliteBook 6 G1q lasted for 983 minutes on average. That’s over 16 hours. It’s a lot, probably more than most people would need, but the battery size has it behind many competing Snapdragon laptops. It’s another way the laptop cuts a corner and doesn’t aim for the high-end premium experience crown. It’s a shame because long battery life matters even more on a 5G laptop, which could be used in locations far from Wi-Fi and power outlets.

The HP EliteBook 6 G1q delivers 5G connectivity that just works. It transforms how you use a laptop like this one, and I hope to see more laptops delivering seamless 5G out of the box in the future. For businesses, it also makes their fleet of laptops remotely trackable and manageable just like a cellular-connected phone or tablet is. The way HP has delivered multi-network 5G you don’t even have to think about is technically impressive.

Unfortunately, the rest of the laptop experience is a lower-end Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus machine. A company that wants to deliver a fleet of connected-but-mid-range laptops to a large number of employees will love these. But I bet the CEO will use a different machine.