Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

HP

HP

HP

HP

As Microsoft's Surface designs have improved and become more successful, clones of the same general idea from the PC OEMs have become more and more common (the same thing happened with the Lenovo Yoga design after Windows 8 came out). Lenovo has the Miix 700, Dell has its new XPS 12, and HP recently debuted the Spectre x2. Most of those PCs straddle the line between tablet and laptop by combining a big touch-capable slab of a tablet with the Surface's kickstand-plus-keyboard-cover idea.

Yesterday, we got a chance to look at another iteration of the idea from HP, dubbed the Elite x2. If you're familiar with HP's naming conventions, you'll know that its "Elite" products are typically high-end business computers that are sleek and well-designed enough to be attractive to home users, and that's what the Elite x2 is trying to do. It's a version of the Surface's design that makes concessions to businesses that like to repair and upgrade systems on-site—you can actually remove the screws hiding underneath its kickstand and pull the screen off with a suction cup, exposing the battery, SSD, motherboard, and the Wi-Fi and cellular cards for easy repair and replacement (as best as we can tell, the RAM is still soldered to the motherboard). The Surface Pro has never been an easy machine to open and work on, so these are all nice options to have.

The construction of the tablet itself is a little on the boxy side but definitely high-end. It's made primarily of aluminum, with the exception of the glass that covers the display and a strip on the back where the camera and its LED flash are embedded. The kickstand is also aluminum, but it's just a thin piece of metal rather than a big aluminum slab like the Surface kickstand. HP tells us that it's made out of 7000-series aluminum (as opposed to the lighter 6000-series aluminum used for the rest of the chassis), which should help keep it sturdy, and it leaves more room in the body of the tablet to fit the battery and other components. The kickstand is stable regardless of the angle you use, and bends back up to 150 degrees, which is useful when you're drawing on it with the pen.

In addition to looking a bit boxier than the Surface Pro 4, the Elite x2 is a bit taller, wider, and heavier than Microsoft's tablet. HP's is about 300mm (11.8 inches) long and 214mm (8.4 inches) tall, compared to 292 and 201.3mm for the Surface. The Elite also weighs 840g (1.85 pounds), compared to 766g (1.69 pounds) for the lightest Surface.

The sides of the Elite x2 are crammed full of ports, buttons, and slots. On the left side you've got a power button, volume rocker, SIM tray, and lock slot. On the right, there's a headphone jack, one full-size USB 3.0 port, a microSD card tray, and a Thunderbolt 3 port that also charges the tablet. Thunderbolt 3 is fully compatible with USB Type-C, and Intel's Thunderbolt controller also provides full 10Gbps USB 3.1 gen 2 speeds, something you can't get from vanilla Type-C ports. HP provides Thunderbolt and USB Type-C docking stations, as well as a wireless 802.11ad docking station that automatically docks the tablet when it's in range (as long as you have the required wireless card).

Like the Surface, the Elite x2 is best when paired with its (included) pen and (optional) keyboard covers. The Wacom digitizer and pen seem functionally similar to what you get with the N-Trig solution in the Surface Pro 4—it's got two buttons on the side and one button on the top that's used for launching OneNote, and it supports 2,048 levels of pressure. I'm not an artist, but scribbling things in OneNote or marking up a page in Microsoft Edge was fast and accurate, and felt more or less the same as doing the same tasks on a Surface.

The keyboard covers are based on the keyboard layout already used in EliteBooks like the 1020 we reviewed late last year, which means it has a nice layout and backlight, good travel, and a fairly large trackpad. The palmrest is aluminum rather than fabric, which makes it feel more laptop-y, and the keyboard folds up against the screen like it does in the Surface Pro 3 and 4 designs to make the whole apparatus more stable on your lap. The standard version of the keyboard is 5.4mm thick and weighs 395g, and an "Advanced" version of the keyboard with integrated NFC and a smart card reader is 8.4mm thick and weighs 470g.

The one place where the Elite x2 definitely falls short of the Surface Pro 4 is in the spec department. The 12-inch screen is 1080p, making it both smaller and lower-resolution than the Surface's display. It only includes Skylake Core m3, m5, and m7 processors, which means all configurations are fanless but that they'll also have lower CPU and GPU performance than the full-fledged Core i5 and i7 versions of the Surface. And there's no option for 16GB of RAM, for those who want or need it. 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, and an LTE option courtesy of Qualcomm are all more-or-less in line with what the Surface offers, and HP offers either SATA, encrypted SATA, or PCI Express SSDs in the M.2 form factor (these can be upgraded after purchase if you'd like). An embedded fingerprint reader on the back is compatible with Windows Hello, but the front-facing webcam doesn't appear to be.

The Elite x2 will start shipping in early January and starts at $899. We've asked HP about the exact specs of that configuration and how much the keyboard accessories will cost, and will update this post when we have those details.

Listing image by HP