HP's newest Omen laptop takes aim at Razer and other rivals

HP just announced a whole heap of laptops (and AI features coming to those laptops) as part of a Spring refresh, but in amongst the workstation computers and enterprise stuff there's one eye-catching gaming launch. Its Omen sub-brand has been a great option in the race to find the best gaming laptop in recent years, and is getting a new model.

The Omen 16 Slim aims to do exactly what its name suggests – take the experience of using the excellent Omen 16 and simply slim it down a little. HP says it'll be 16% thinner than the full-sized Omen 16, which might not sound like much but should be extremely noticeable on the lap or in a backpack.

Needless to say, it can pair that sleekness with powerful specs, with the option of speccing up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPU, and a Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU. Those two in combination should make for eye-catching graphical capabilities.

Still, the design is the more interesting element for me at a distance (not having had the chance to try the laptop out). I'd even wonder whether this might be a trial run of a new design entirely – after all, if you can make those specs work in this form, why not make the Omen 16 look a bit slimmer and sleeker permanently?

The market has shown that gamers do love a gaming laptop that can pass for something less powerful, with the Razer Blade lineup showcasing this better than arguably any other rival. If HP has decided that it needs to slim its gaming machines down to compete, that can only be interesting for the market at large.

Of course, that all comes with a big asterisk – I don't have pricing or a release date for the Omen 16 Slim yet. The former of those two numbers will be pretty key in deciding just how worthy a contender it really is.