- Well, we finally did it.
I managed to get my hands on the HP Envy x2.
We had to go out and buy this device
since they're so hard to find.
I've been using it for the last two weeks
and today, well, I wanna give you
the definitive review of this device.
Stay tuned.
(upbeat electronic music)
Alright, before we get started, there's a lot to unpack
with this device, so this video may be
a little bit longer than usual,
but I think you'll appreciate all the detail I give.
We'll go through the hardware first,
which is very good and pretty impressive.
Then we'll touch on Windows 10 on ARM,
which is probably the most interesting aspect.
Then we'll talk about why I like this device, basically.
I used it for the last week at Microsoft Build
while I was out in Seattle, it was my primary device.
So here it is, the hardware for the HP Envy x2,
and I don't wanna pull any punches here.
This is a premium device, one of the best-built tablets
I've ever felt, and if you've been looking for an iPad Pro
that runs Windows 10, well this is the closest thing
you're gonna get to it.
HP, in my opinion, did an outstanding job.
It's an all-metal design, uni-body, very thin,
it's about seven millimeters, about the thickness
of a pencil and should be about as thin as an iPhone.
It's just really, really amazing, and very light too.
Of course, you're gonna probably use it in the case,
which comes with it, most of the time.
But it's still nice to be able to pull it out
and just hold it like a regular tablet.
Turn to the left side of the device we find
the single and solitary USB Type C port
that is used for charging, or you can the use included
USB Type A converter there.
There's also a little LED there
to show it when it's charging.
It is not Thunderbolt 3, don't forget that's
an Intel technology, this is Qualcomm
so you won't have that feature.
But you can put a peripheral up to this
and connect a bunch of things to it,
and it seems to work pretty well,
but Windows 10 and ARM is still a little tricky
when it comes some peripherals.
Coming up on the upper side here,
we do find the MicroSD card, so you can put that
in there for expansion.
This device ships specifically with 120 gigabytes
of internal storage, so you can easily expand that
with this card, which is really nice.
On the right-hand side, not a lot going on.
You do have the SIM slot for the nano SIM.
Now, you can throw anything in this,
including Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, whatever.
I should point out though, as of right now,
AT&T and T-Mobile I believe still need to certify
this device on their network.
That doesn't mean a ton, I've been running this
with the AT&T SIM in there and it runs just fine.
But when you try to run the AT&T app,
it will say it's not recognized.
That is in the process now of getting approved,
so that shouldn't be too big of a deal.
We also find the volume keys here on the side,
and the Bang & Olufsen logo.
Not a lot going on but at the bottom here
we do also have a headphone jack,
so it's kind of cool they put it at the bottom
versus Surface, which puts it at the top.
I know a lot of people prefer down here, so there you go.
Alright, next to the shiny HP logo, we find a five megapixel
rear-facing, or world-facing, camera.
It's actually a very good camera.
I'm not saying it's gonna blow away
your iPhone or Android device,
I'm saying it's probably where
the Lumia 720 was a few years ago.
It's a lot better than you would expect,
so if you do plan using this to occasionally take photos,
you won't be terribly disappointed.
It's still a tablet camera, I wanna keep that perspective,
but again, better than anticipated.
You also have a microphone hole there
and a couple more microphone holes on top.
This does have a far-field microphone array
on there for Cortana.
Turning to the front of the device,
you do find the front-facing camera, which is pretty solid.
You also have Windows Hello facial recognition
with an IR camera.
You know, of all the Windows Hello systems I've used,
this one's not the best.
It works, and it works about 90% of the time,
but every once in a while I find it failing,
and it fails at a higher rate than I've used
on any other device.
It's not a big deal, I just find they probably
made some compromises here.
I'd still rather have that though,
than say, a fingerprint reader, so it's not terrible.
Turning to the display itself, you're talking
a 1920 by 1280 resolution, so basically full HD.
It is a three by two aspect ratio,
and HP does do that for tablets,
and I'm very happy to see that here.
It's probably one reason I really like this device.
It's a very good display, brightness goes pretty high.
It doesn't have much glare to it,
as you can probably see here with
my hand going in front of it.
Flanking that great display are two speakers,
front-facing as well, same position as the Surface Pro.
If I had to rate these speakers,
I would say better than expected.
HP has really sort of figured out
how this stuff is supposed to work.
These are very good speakers, not a ton of bass,
and you wouldn't expect that, but it's just very good audio,
and I was kinda surprised by how good it is.
Now, the bezels are a little bit thicker
than I would like on this device, but then again,
they do anticipate people using this as a tablet,
so you're gonna want to hold the device
without accidentally touching the display,
especially for presentations in business environments,
so I kinda understand that.
But I totally get if you're thinking you'd like to see just
a little bit shaved off of that, I agree with you 100%.
So let's talk about the included portfolio cover
and keyboard, as you can see it just snaps in here.
Very strong magnets, they did a great job here
in designing this.
It clicks to the back, sticks to it.
And you can use this flat, or there are magnets
and you can put it at an angle.
Really nice design here.
The back flips down on a hinge, really clever.
And I know some people are looking at this and thinking,
"Oh, that's a terrible design."
And using this every day for the last two weeks,
I actually really like this design.
For one, you're protecting this device
when you throw it in the bag.
The back of this device it metal,
it can easily scratch, but it'll always be protected.
That hinge is very stiff.
Now, it's not as stiff as, say, the Surface Pro,
but it works very well, including in the lap.
I used this on the airplane exclusively,
I used it at events, and wherever I was, even a taxi cab,
I had no problems using this device on my lap.
I thought it worked very well.
Turning to the keyboard itself.
This is a really good keyboard, and what I mean by that,
take the Surface Pro's design for its keyboard,
and combine it with what HP's been doing
with its EliteBook series, that's this keyboard.
In fact, that's what HP told me they were going for.
And they did a fantastic job.
The travel's very good on this,
it's very consistent on all the keys.
It is back-lit, it is manually controlled.
I will say, on this device running back-light all the time,
it doesn't have the sensor to turn on automatically,
so you'll probably drain the battery quickly with it,
but you just have the button here, turns it on and off.
Very good travel, though.
One of my favorite keyboards.
The material itself is a leather,
so for people that don't like the Alcantara
or are worried about it getting dirty,
HP is got you covered, they went the more traditional
blue leather which I think looks really good.
Turning to the trackpad, they still have
their elongated weird trackpad, but I'm okay with that.
I'd rather have more trackpad than less.
Could you imagine if it was short like that?
It would look kinda weird and just not be as good.
And it's a very good trackpad, on par with the Surface Pro's
and I'm happy to report, it does use precision drivers,
so HP is taking my advice, I like to think,
and they put precision drivers in here.
Just a really good trackpad, that's one of
the reasons I like this device so much.
Alright, let's talk about the pen.
It's included in the box, along with the keyboard
and the device, always a nice touch.
This is a familiar HP pen.
It's not their brand new one that charges by USB Type C,
so you do have a single battery that goes on the inside.
You have two buttons here as well.
Now this is using N-trig technology,
so you could use your Surface pad on here,
or your, if you have a Wacom Bamboo Ink Pad,
you could use that as well.
I couldn't get outta HP what the pressure levels
on the device were, my guess it's 2,048.
It could be up in the 4,000 range.
All I can say, it's a very good pen experience.
It feels a lot like the Surface Pro 4 to me,
so I'm very happy with it.
Plus, it does have this cool little pen loop on board,
which makes carrying this pen very easy.
So a little bit more on the hardware options,
this is the four gigabytes of RAM and 120 gigs of storage.
There's supposed to be a 256 and eight gigabytes of RAM,
a little bit later on.
Alright, so the processor.
This is running a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835,
which is found in many smartphones today.
It's not as quite as good as the new 845,
I actually expect news around Windows 10
and the Snapdragon 845 at Computex, so stay tuned for that.
But this is actually a good processor for this device.
And I wanna be very clear here.
Let's talk about Windows 10 and ARM.
So this is running full Windows 10.
It comes with Windows 10 S, so that means it is locked
to the store, but you can upgrade to Windows 10 Pro
for free through the store, as well.
And I haven't done that yet, so if you're looking
for me to talk about running Win-32 apps,
I'm gonna do that in a separate video,
because I think that's a super interesting topic
and it's been complicated by the fact that
since I got this device Microsoft has released,
in preview to developers, the ability to recompile apps
in X64 ARM, and it's kind of a game changer,
because it makes running apps a lot smoother
and opens the doors up.
However, it requirs devs to recompile their apps.
That's not a big deal, they don't even have
to add any new code to the app,
they can just literally hit a button and recompile it,
put it into the store, but Microsoft knows devs.
This stuff could take them six months to do.
So what they have is the emulation layer
that they can fall back to.
But HP was very clear when I asked them about this.
They expect people to be able to run native apps on this,
that is, UWP store apps, for the best experience.
While you can run x86 and run the emulation layer,
that's more of a fallback, just in case.
They are very excited about this SDK coming out
because they said it is really gonna make
Windows 10 on ARM shine, but we'll have to wait
a few months to see that.
Alright, let's talk about the benefits of Windows 10 on ARM.
And there are quite a few, but before I say this,
I wanna get this outta the way.
This device is meant for a very particular user.
In fact, I think it's kinda meant for someone like me.
That is, I need a light computing device
that I can easily take with me on trips,
that allows me to, say, record in meetings,
take notes, get all day battery life,
do email, do my stuff for the Windows Central website,
communicate with people, use Skype.
This is a light computing tablet device,
and that's what this is meant for.
If you're looking to game on this,
if you're looking to make this your main, everyday PC,
you're probably going to be disappointed.
And that's just being really honest here.
And that's totally fine, not everybody is looking for that.
I wouldn't use this as my main PC,
I have a desktop for that.
But for when I travel, this served to be pretty awesome.
Specifically, there are a couple
of things I really liked about it.
All-day battery life.
So there's a lot of hype around
the 22-hours of battery life that HP was claiming.
They're not entirely wrong on that.
This easily gets ten hours of battery life,
but pushes more around 15 hours, and that's real-time usage.
Even more, in standby it gets zero drainage.
You can leave this for days and turn it back on,
and it will just be there with full battery.
And it is a liberating experience, to be able to go
through meetings and take this around with you all day
and still have like 75% battery life.
It's just super impressive.
So those claims are totally legitimate.
The other cool feature, of course, is Instant On.
So, a lot of laptops running Intel systems
have gotten better with this, in fact the Surface Pro
has a sort of more improved Instant On,
if you ever watched my original review, I talk about that.
Dell still doesn't do this for some reason.
It has to do with the SD card, and it resumes more quickly.
That doesn't matter for this device.
This device is basically always on,
just like your smartphone.
Another cool feature that no one has really talked about,
is because this device is always on
and in that standby state, Hey Cortana works all the time.
That is, I can leave this device closed
with the cover on and just go up to it and say,
"Hey Cortana, when's my next meeting?"
And it'll totally come on and the speakers work
and I can hear it.
It's an always-on listening device.
So, it's sort of like having the Invoke Speaker
just with you all the time, and it's really impressive.
Along those same lines, because it's always on
Skype works better, if a Skype call comes in
it doesn't need to wake the device,
it just turns on again, like your smartphone.
And that feature is super important for people
who rely on Skype or any kind of web communication.
Likewise, when email comes in,
you can get notifications all the time as well.
So there's a lot of cool benefits
to having a device that's just always on.
And the other half of that is the always connected bit.
So of course, as I mentioned earlier, this runs LTE,
and that is totally liberating.
I love having devices with LTE on board.
Now getting back to performance with that Snapdragon 835,
everybody keeps asking what are the benchmarks,
what does it feel like, is this just an Atom processor?
I had no issues using this device for my everyday tasks,
that's a big deal, I never got frustrated
when I launched an app or something took a real long time.
Sure, something like Slack, which is a recompiled app that's
in the store did take a little bit longer
to initially launch, but once it was running
it was totally fine.
Now, I'm not saying this was a blazing-fast device.
If you have a Core i7 laptop, that will be way faster.
But for me, the issue is, is this frustrating to use?
And the answer is no.
Of course, I'm sticking to Windows 10 apps in this store
so that may be why, but there is still a lot
of good performance here for the everyday user
looking for a light-computing tablet.
And another cool feature you may have noticed
is this has no fans on board as expected,
neither does your smartphone, so.
Yeah, there's no cooling on this device
and it doesn't really get hot either,
it's just been very nice to use, so that's a good benefit.
It's great also having USB Type C.
The charger that comes in the box
is actually an okay charger.
It's a three-pronged AC one, which to me is weird.
Cellphones don't use that, and in fact I've used
some Intel devices that don't use three-pronged,
so I'm a little disappointed in that,
but it's a small charger.
But the cool thing is, this is USB Type C,
so you can use any USB Type C charger with this.
Alright, so let's bring it all in now.
This is a very expensive device, they cost $1,000 and I know
a lot of people have been freaking out about that,
but how HP sees it, and I'll leave it up to you whether
or not you think it's justified,
they're comparing this to the iPad Pro.
Now, when you spec out the iPad Pro
with the same features set, well when you do that
and then throw in LTE, and you throw in the extra keyboard
you actually have to buy with it,
and you throw in the pencil, that device is $1,440.
This is a thousand.
Is $440 worth it to you?
I don't know, it's up to you, but that's how
they're positioning this, that is,
someone has a regular full PC and they need an iPad Pro
and they're looking at that device,
well this is a competitor to that.
Now, you may not see it that way.
You may be looking at this as your only PC you're gonna buy,
in which case I don't think that analogy holds up,
but I kind of agree with how HP is seeing this device.
I've been wanting an iPad Pro-like device
that runs Windows 10 for years,
and this is pretty damn close to it.
This is really nice hardware, it's so premium.
It's way better than you would expect.
The audio is good, the cameras are good,
the keyboard experience is great,
excellent trackpad on there, and it comes
with a great pen in the box, it's got LTE,
this has all the stuff I want.
Now, when it comes to running full Win-32 apps,
and your favorite games from Steam, this is not your device,
and that is one area where this does fall.
The iPad Pro is very good at gaming, this is not.
Do not buy this if you expect to play games on it.
Sure, you can do Candy Crush and some light arcade stuff
on here, but overall it's going to fail
when it comes to anything larger, and that's still
a limitation of this platform for right now.
So, I should also point out that there is and Intel version
coming out of this device later this summer,
so that's gonna run an Intel Core M processor,
so it's still not quite a Core I processor,
but it'll be much more powerful than this,
and I think that's a given.
But, there are compromises with that device, too.
It is gonna be thicker, at least a millimeter thicker,
which is not crazy but it is a larger device.
Battery life will probably be about half of what
this device is, and you won't get that Instant On feature.
It will have an LTE option, though, that is available.
I'm unclear about the pricing, I've asked HP
for clarification, but my guess is, being an Intel system,
that will be a few hundred dollars more expensive
than this but we'll have to wait and see there.
But if you're looking for a light-computing tablet
that allows you to go anywhere and do things like
work in Microsoft Office, use the web, use email,
and do all that on the go with ease,
this is a pretty cool device.
Don't forget, there's a lot of stuff you can't do
on the iPad Pro, for instance, you don't have a right-click,
you have a lot fewer menu options,
it's just not quite as good a productive device as this is.
The iPad Pro makes an excellent tablet, but it's a poor PC.
This is a pretty good PC that makes also a very good tablet.
It's not quite as strong as a regular PC
and that's where the compromise is gonna be,
but this is, for a lot of people,
especially Windows phone fans, the best of both worlds.
Alright, so that's my review of the HP Envy x2
with Windows 10 on ARM now.
We'll be doing a lot more content on this,
including taking a look at running actual Win-32 apps
on there and what it's like, so stay tuned for that.
Now, if I didn't answer all your questions,
that's okay, I'm not perfect, leave me a comment below,
ask 'em there, and I'll see about doing
a follow-up video where I'll try to go through those.
If you like this video, give us a thumbs up
and, as always, don't forget to subscribe.
Thanks for watching, take care everybody.