HP Wants Back In: The Elite X3 Windows 10 Smartphone And 'Dumb' Laptop

Remember those HP smartphones? You probably don’t, because HP was not exactly a winner in the early days of mobile hardware. Suffice it to say, HP almost entirely exited the smartphone business, and hard, after the Palm experiment failed a few years ago.

But that was then and this is now, and the mobile business has changed dramatically since then, with one of most notable mobile trends being a convergence of smartphones, PCs and productivity. HP is not just trying to capitalize that trend--it seeks to define it, and it wants to do so with the Elite X3 smartphone, a “dumb” laptop shell, and a desktop dock.

At Build last spring, Microsoft announced that Windows 10 would run on Windows Phones with Universal Apps, and that you could use those phones with a Display Dock to connect peripherals and show the phone’s contents on a monitor, with the formatting of the apps befitting the larger display size.

Microsoft itself has proven that this works, with the Lumia 950 and the Display Dock, and companies such as Acer appear to be jazzed about the idea as well. HP, though is -- to hear its product reps tell it -- all in. It’s also the first company to employ the “dumb” clamshell concept (that is, the smartphone somehow docks into a laptop shell and powers the display) with a device that actually may have enough internal horsepower to work.

The Elite X3

So named because of its triple-threat raison d'être, the HP Elite X3 is by itself a high-end smartphone, but it also can function as the engine of a laptop-style device (the “HP Mobile Extender”), and you can park it in the HP Desk Dock and display the screen on a larger external monitor.

In order to pull this off, the Elite X3 needs some killer specs, and HP spared no expense in that department. The 5.96-inch AMOLED display is 2560x1440, and there’s 4 GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM and 64 GB eMMC 5.1 storage (with the capability for up to a whopping 2 TB of storage via the microSD card slot). In the Elite X3’s heart beats the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 SoC (2.15 GHz, quad-core) with an Adreno 530 GPU. (On the SoC, HP is not dogmatic, though; a representative told us that they would consider switching to an Intel Atom chip, but for now they wanted optimal performance and felt that the 820 was the best choice.)

The front 8MP camera has an Iris camera (hello, Windows Hello) that can capture and then stitch two images together in the software for ostensibly a better photo. Both it and the rear-facing 16MP camera shoot in FHD. Speaking of security measures, there’s also a fingerprint reader, which brings the number of biometric authentication methods on this phone to two. There is a USB Type-C port, but all we know about it at this point is that it’s USB 3.0.

The Elite X3’s body is mostly polycarbonate, but it does have a healthy amount of metal trim, which gives it some durability. The front of the phone has a striking “holy” speaker grill design by Bang & Olufsen, which actually evokes the “pogo pins” on the bottom of the device. These allow HP partners to develop dedicated, add-on capabilities (called “jacket extensions”) for the medical field, POS applications and so on. There’s a large-capacity 4,150 mAh battery powering the whole thing.

And of course, it runs Windows 10 Mobile (I guess we’re back to calling it that again?) and has Continuum. (Have a look at the rest of the specs at the botton of this article.)

“Accessories” Is An Inadequate Term

We’re typically not much interested in “accessories,” but the term hardly applies to the items you’ll be able to buy to go with the Elite X3.

Details are rather light thus far, but the aforementioned HP Mobile Extender (which HP is affectionately calling “MeDock”) is like a robot that just needs you to plug in a soul. We aren’t really sure at this point how the phone docks into/with it, but given that HP described it as a sort of thin client, we’d guess that you’re just connecting the phone to it with a cable, and/or wirelessly.

It has a 12.5-inch diagonal “near-borderless” display and a 48 wH battery all its own. Obviously, it has a keyboard and touchpad, as well. It also has at least one USB Type-C port that supports Power Delivery, meaning one device can charge the other while connected.

The HP Desk Dock is less titillating than the Mobile Extender, but it’s no less compelling. It follows some of the same basic ideas as Acer’s yet-to-be-named dock for its Liquid Jame Primo handset in that the Elite X3 sits propped upright in a little holder on the desk. A USB Type-C cable connects the dock to a large display, and you can connect at least two other devices via the two USB Type-A ports. The dock also has a DisplayPort, an Ethernet port and a “rapid charging” feature. Via Continuum, the connected phone shows apps on the large display in a desktop-looking environment.

HP Workspace And The Continuing App Kludge

The primary criticism leveled at Windows Phone has always been the poor app ecosystem relative to what iOS and Android enjoy. Microsoft has tackled that problem head-on recently, though with mixed success.

The concept of Universal Apps -- that is, applications like Word and Outlook that share common code and can run on all manner of systems with Windows 10 -- was a victory, to be sure. However, the Microsoft’s intiatives to make it easy to port Android and iOS apps onto Window 10 Mobile seem to have little traction at this point. Further, you can’t run legacy x86 applications on Windows 10 Mobile.

To solve this app problem, HP went to the well it knows in the enterprise: virtualization. With its HP WorkSpace, the company can run legacy x86 applications in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)  on the phone. WorkSpace offers SSO and full keyboard and mouse support when the device is docked, too. For everything else, there are plenty of Universal Apps to pick from.

It makes sense; enterprise users are accustomed to virtualizing legacy apps anyway, so this should be a logical extension of that paradigm. However, you can’t run just any legacy program. HP WorkSpace maintains a curated list of x86 programs.

Assuming the virtualization works as smoothly as HP hopes, though, critics of the app problems on Windows 10 Mobile still aren’t necessarily silenced. The rather kludgy mess of ways to get apps isn’t winning too many users to Windows 10 Mobile; there are app store apps, Universal apps, apps ported from other OSes, and legacy applications running in a virtual machine. If all of those methods work flawlessly, then it’s pretty brilliant, but if they create confusion and end up with performance issues, then it’s a disaster. The jury is still out on which it is, but HP has decided that it’s close enough to the former.

By the way, if you’re getting a sneaking suspicion that this device is aimed primarily at the business space, your hackles are accurate. In our briefing on the Elite X3 and its related technologies HP reps didn’t really have a clear answer when someone asked if this would all be available for consumer. In essence, it probably will be, we guess.

Availability is slated for August. There is no pricing information to share at this time, but expect to pay over $1,000, at least for a bundle that includes the Elite X3 itself, the Mobile Extender and the Desk Dock. The accessories, though, will be mainly sold separately; you can still just buy the Elite X3 because it’s a high-end Windows 10 smartphone.

Seth Colaner is the News Director for Tom's Hardware. Follow him on Twitter @SethColaner. Follow us on Facebook, Google+, RSS, Twitter and YouTube.