Enter the Omnibook...

I’ve not bought a proper laptop for myself for ages. A few years ago I bought an M1 powered MacBook Air to see what the fuss was all about. It’s a lovely machine and it works a treat, but I’ve never really got on with it for doing proper work, what with it not running Windows and all. So last week, having got some unexpected royalties (which are always nice) I got myself a Windows Copilot notebook in the form of the HP Omnibook X 14. There are some very good deals on this at the moment.

I like it a lot. It’s around half the price of the equivalent Microsoft Surface. The hard drive is slightly small, but I can take the back off the laptop and replace the drive with a larger one if I need to. The battery life is supposed to be awesome and so far I’m agreeing with that.

The Omnibook is based on the Snapdragon ARM chip, which means that it needs to use an emulation layer to run “standard” Windows applications. I had a very similar experience with the MacBook, where a process called Rosetta ran Intel based Mac applications. The Windows version of this is called “Prism” and it works pretty well. The applications that I need seem to run pretty well. Applications like Word and the Edge browser have already been converted to Snapdragon hardware and they run very well indeed. I’m looking forward to finding out how good it is for getting things done.