Review: HP EliteBook 6 G1q

The Wi-Fi’s down again. The Wi-Fi’s always down, isn’t it? Potential solutions include giving up your primo seat at the coffee shop and setting up somewhere else, or trying to get the mobile hot spot on your phone to work—both of which are perilous options.

With its new EliteBook 6 G1 line, HP offers a simpler solution: Just use the 5G radio embedded in the laptop to hop online, no additional configuration required.

Go Online

Photograph: Chris Null

For my money, HP Go is easily the biggest and best-selling point on the EliteBook 6 G1q, which HP describes as “a connected, seamlessly productive experience that helps mitigate security vulnerabilities, end user frustration, and organization hidden costs to stay connected.”

That’s a long way of saying that the integrated cellular radio doesn’t require any extra configuration or login hassles when you use it. Instead, it’s always there, waiting in the background, at the ready. If you’ve got a paid subscription (plan prices haven’t been announced but are expected to start at $19 per month), the service kicks in automatically when you’re disconnected from Wi-Fi and goes dark when the Wi-Fi’s live.

The service works well—or, at least, as well as the 5G signal is in your area. In my house, cell service is spotty, and HP Go was hit or miss. But on the road, in a beachfront rental with decidedly shoddy Wi-Fi, HP Go worked great, providing me with a reliable backup connection when I needed it the most.

HP Go is installed on a laptop, though it seems almost incidental to the main event. The EliteBook 6 G1q is a Qualcomm-based system, with rather pedestrian specs that are similar to what was on the market a year ago. The now-snoozy Snapdragon X Plus X1P42100 anchors the Windows machine, backed up by a healthy 32 GB of RAM and a sad 512 GB SSD (in the test configuration I was sent). The 14-inch screen packs a low-end 1920 x 1200 pixels of resolution and one of the dimmer backlights I’ve encountered in recent history. The screen isn’t touch-sensitive, but that’s for the best, as it’s a bit wobbly when jostled. (You can upgrade to a touchscreen if you opt to customize your build.)

Photograph: Chris Null

Benchmark scores were unsurprising, turning in slightly above-average numbers across the board when compared to other Snapdragon X Plus laptops. Even its battery life of just over 17 hours when playing a full-screen video via YouTube (over Wi-Fi, not HP Go) is about in the middle of all Qualcomm-based systems I’ve encountered—though that’s admittedly still an excellent mark compared to all laptops.

The industrial design is utilitarian, though just shy of being completely boring. The silver machine, crafted from partially recycled aluminum and plastic, has a look that feels dated, and at 24 mm thick and 3.2 pounds, it’s also very heavy for a 14-inch system. (It feels heavy in the hand and on the lap as well.) Props, however, for the textured surface on the keyboard caps, which makes for a more pleasant typing experience than most laptops provide—though note it does not offer any backlighting. The trackpad is spacious without being obtrusive in size.

Port selection is also solid, including two USB-C ports with USB4 support, two USB-A ports, a full-size HDMI jack, and a drop-jaw Ethernet port. The SIM card slot is also accessible from the side of the device; users can bring their own data plan if they don’t want to use the multicarrier HP Go, which works via eSIM.

Poor Value

Photograph: Chris Null

The G1q is a Copilot+ PC and, as with more general workloads, it turned in perfectly acceptable scores on AI-based jobs like image generation and computer vision tests. It’s plenty stable in daily use; in fact, the only trouble I encountered was during initial setup, when it lost its internet connection midway and forced me to start over from scratch—annoying, but a one-time problem that never cropped up again.

The unit stays cool most of the time, even under modest loads, and it can take some work to get the fan to kick in. However, once it does, it can buzz with a healthy rumble.

While HP touts some cool new features like Onlooker Detection (which can black out the screen if someone tries to peek behind you), this wasn’t available on the unit I was sent, so I couldn’t try it out. The low-end webcam on the device also didn’t support Windows Hello, so I was unable to test Microsoft Recall on the device either. The good news is that a 5-MP camera upgrade costs a whopping $11 during configuration, so be sure to spring for it.

One final, quirky problem: I found HP’s integrated AI assistant to be completely useless, unable to answer any questions at all that I asked it about features on the laptop.

Ultimately, the G1q is just not a great value. At $2,945 with all the aforementioned specs, it’s the most expensive Snapdragon X Plus system I’ve tested to date, even though it’s missing some of the basics (no keyboard backlight or touchscreen?) and lacks much in the way of extras that would justify a cost that’s significantly higher than its competitors. Well, except for one: I will admit that HP Go is awesome. It isn’t $2,945 awesome, but still.