back to article Everything you need to know about HP's three-in-one x3 deals

Is HP’s ambitious 3-in-one phablet replacement for PCs for you? Probably not for most of you, you may gather, but it does make for a fascinating proposition, and obvious sense for some workers wrestling with cumbersome old kit. HP explained to us how this week – with more details of how much all this will cost. The idea is to …

  1. Aladdin Sane

    Shiny

    Very shiny

  2. tiggity Silver badge

    X3

    Sure they were not drinking xxxx to come up with this idea?

  3. Dan 55 Silver badge
    Meh

    "The box for the x3 Phone and Dock could conceal a coffin, or a small child"

    HP are cutting back on packaging I see.

  4. Chris Miller

    If you have VDI (e.g. Citrix) you can run your corporate desktop on anything that has a Citrix client; which is pretty much anything, certainly any phone (even Blackberry).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Yes but can you connect the blackberry to a lapdock, a screen and external kit? And how much are you paying for a citrix server, licences and support staff?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Users use a surprisingly small number..."

    Actually, this is a classic example about how statistics can be deceiving. The reality is there is a big number of specific, often custom made, applications (often of critical use for a given company) used by a relative small set of people, so they will never make the chart of the "most common applications".

    What the chart shows are not the "most used applications", it shows the application which have a chance of being most common among users very different users.

  6. AndyS

    So it costs nearly £700 / year to use, with a limit on hours you're allowed to use it which many execs will hit in a week or maybe 2.

    To replace a laptop, which probably costs about £700, and/or a tablet, which probably costs similar.

    Oh, and it doesn't run standard Windows software, and there's not much software available for it. Want to edit an image using gimp? Want to monitor a manufacturing process? Want to check your kid's baby monitor? Tough.

    Prediction: crash and burn.

    I'll tell you what. I'd rather have my phone in my pocket (for phone things and light reading), and a tablet and / or laptop in a bag (for real work and / or presentations, videos etc). Rather than a phone and a laptop shell thing which can't do anything by itself and costs as much to rent for a few hours per month as a real laptop costs to own.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      It's not for execs of 10,000 employee companies. Probably not for serious image editing either. Non work baby monitoring maybe

      https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9nblggh4ww9p

      Rather have a laptop as well? Maybe the company doesn't want to shell out for another office licence and oracle licence and a server and backup, oh and someone to look after it all. I don't know about you but my salary is quite a bit more than £700 a year.

      Light formating of office docs is possible anywhere for as long as you have power, all included.

      This kit is not for you but maybe your company could benefit.

      1. AndyS

        > I don't know about you but my salary is quite a bit more than £700 a year.

        Does your company really employ one person for every computer in use?

        That's impressive.

        What about the computers used by the people looking after the computers. Do they get a person too?

        Can I take the person with me when I travel?

        Do they sit beside me at my desk? Do I need to make them tea too? If I take the laptop home, do I need to provide them with board and lodging?

        Oh actually scrub that, it seems we have about 1 person per 1,000 computers in the company (wild stab-in-the-dark guess), so at a salary of, I dunno, £30k, that means each computer costs about £30/year to support, assuming they're doing nothing else.

        To your other points, I am a mid-level manager in an aerospace engineering company. I travel reasonably regularly. This would not suit me. It would also not suit any of the people in my department, nor would it suit the higher ups. It certainly wouldn't suit the execs and directors. As you already pointed out, an office licence is negligable spare change compared to my wages and. Since this is about portable equipment, the average costs of flights & accommodation on most trips probably far exceed the cost of a brand new laptop with all the MS licencing costs, which as I've noted are already dwarfed by the annual cost of licencing this... empty shell thing.

        So, who is it aimed at? I'm not denying it would be useful if it could run a real OS, didn't cost as much as a real computer per year to licence, and wasn't crippled to a limited number of hours. But as it is? Useless.

  7. Fizzl
    Meh

    Almost but

    I still want a do it all x86 phone.

    My experience of HP over the years says no thanks. I gave them a chance last year with the 8inch cherry trail tablet but it had so many issues I eventually got a refund and went with the 8inch dell.

    Still would be nice to have a small pc in my pocket instead of a tablet and an android.

  8. klaxhu

    This will be another phone (sorry, meant to say flop!) from hp?

    I was a user of two of their phones in the past and I honestly think this will be a flop as well. There is no space for them in the market although they are trying hard as they do not come with anything compelling.

    I will give them 6-12 months if this will even start to fly before they close it down.

    Bunch of old guys in their R&D department who need to retire and let young enthusiasts run it with a simple but effective strategy.

    Sad to see them try and fail constantly as I used to work for them long time ago and kind of drank the cool-aid back then.

  9. Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese Silver badge

    The last image

    Interesting order that they've arranged things in. You look at the right-most item to see what you assume is the highest-cost option, think "that's not do bad" move your eyes slightly to the left and....

    1. James 51

      Re: The last image

      And those prices are ex. VAT.

  10. Tim 11

    What's the point?

    I'm mystified by this constant desire to consolidate all our devices into one all-encompassing hopeless compromise.

    I own a big Dell laptop for work, a MacBook air for casual computing, a Nokia 105 for calls and text, a smartphone for those (rare) occasions when I need the internet on the move, and a Kindle for reading books. Each of these is better than any of the others for the thing I use it for (and I don't need a tablet because there's nothing they are good at).

    Sure, it means I'm occasionally carrying 2 devices with me, but 90% of the time the only one I'm carrying weighs 70g and only needs to be charged once a fortnight.

    1. cambsukguy

      Re: What's the point?

      A MacBook air for casual computing.

      Obviously, you have money to spare, lots of people don't.

      As the article clearly stated. this device is squarely aimed at institutional type users that possibly have to be mobile and perhaps hot desk and travel often and give presentations.

      Not really aimed at you.

      The phone is a fairly good price if you like WinPhone, looks worse because Lumia 950 XLs are cheap these days.

      The desk dock is only 20 quid on top, that is cheap.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What's the point?

      Do you own a calculator, an alarm clock, a camera, an mp3 player, a sat nav, a contacts book? I think you can see the desire for consolidation from a great many people who share this planet with you.

  11. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    Can't connect an iPhone/iPad to a projector?

    Er? I beg to differ.

    If this is not possible how did I do a complete presentation last week using my iPad mini and a full HD projector?

    This is how.

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/Apple-Lightning-Digital-AV-Adapter/dp/B009WHV3BM

    Perhaos the HP Marketing Droids have been drinking the Sharepoint coolaid a bit too long. If it is not made by MS then it does not exist (Apparently)

    As has been observed already this will only work if are on the OpEx is better than CapEx rollercoaster.

    1. Lord Elpuss Silver badge

      Re: Can't connect an iPhone/iPad to a projector?

      Took the words out of my mouth. I run presentations from iPad and iPhone all the time.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Can't connect an iPhone/iPad to a projector?

      Continuum does wireless projection as well.

  12. Snowy Silver badge

    I like the idea but...

    The price as was with the Motorola Atrix is far to high for the "Laptop" dock. From what I can see it is just a screen, a keyboard and some speakers, Anything else that is in it just just a duplicate of what is already in the phone. If they can not use the resources of the phone then it is just badly designed.

    For £430 you can get a way better laptop than this laptop dock is going to be, this is going to crash and burn.

    1. Paul Fowler

      Re: I like the idea but...

      For £430 you can get a way better laptop than this laptop dock

      And you pay for another office licence, a server and IT support staff. The whole premise is going to be making use of continuum and HP Workspace, if you have no need for that then don't buy the phone it's not targeted at you.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Never have I seen more people desperate to justify why they shouldn't have a device. Normally people are desperate to justify why they should have a macbook, iphone, surface or colour laser printer on their desk.

    This device is not for people in an IT department with onsite servers. I have seen a large hotel chain get rid of their servers and just use pc's to connect to gmail and google's cloud for storage. So I can see why a small company with an outdated server and pc's may just decide to cancel the outsourced support and take up this option. It really is only worthwhile if you make use of Continuum and HP Workspace, but if that is the case I can see why they would look seriously at this option backed by HP.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I liked the picture with the coffee cup. It reminded of when the HP & CPQ merger was announced, one of my contractor devs called me to warn me that the HP salesmen regarded X86 servers as ..... "Well, it has a DVD-ROM in there so you can use it as a coffee cup holder. Now, if you want a proper computer, we have HP9000 over here .....". HP. Still clueless. After all these years.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    The idea is to replace three business devices

    "The idea is to replace three business devices (laptop, tablet, phone) with one, a phone that does tricks. The Elite x3, a Windows 10 phone"

    Can you install Linux on these devices?

  16. Mikel

    It's for Enterprise

    In this case, "Enterprise" is defined as "Idiots spending way too much of somebody else's money on technology they're not personally going to have to use." Microsoft's ideal market - a field where the end user already knows he's a victim of procurement even before delivery, and must trudge on making the most of it because every month the rent comes due.

    Because nobody sane would spend this much of their own money, or choose this.

  17. boidsonly

    UWP? No thanks....

  18. Richard 12 Silver badge

    It's for travelling salescritters

    Powerpoint, email, a few small spreadsheets, PDF and light browsing.

    As long you can run a hosted edition of the relevant ERP applications - which are rapidly becoming browser-based anyway - then it's actually near-perfect for that type of user.

    The hard part is convincing these salescritters that they do not need an iPad or a Macbook Air

  19. Fuzz

    Office 365

    To use the UWP office apps to edit documents on a screen larger than 8" requires an office 365 subscription. Is that the case with this too?

    If so then I can't see the benefit. Any windows laptop has access to the office apps and you can use your 365 license across your iPad, android phone, desktop and laptop.

    Also, docking with the laptop part is via miracast or USB cable, this doesn't sound like much of a "dock" to me. I was expecting some kind of slot that the phone fitted in to. You can buy a decent laptop and a Lumia 950XL for the same price as this package and it will do more stuff, including allowing you to use your phone from your laptop (if for some weird reason that is something you want to do).

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No chance whatsoever. MSFT and HP still think the PC is the center of peoples' universe and they can throw a good enough phone with a good enough number of apps at them. The opposite is true. People want a phone built to their specs, the PC is less important.... Also, the only reason anyone would buy this phone is that they really like the Windows PC and want it to be everywhere, but this isn't the full PC client of Windows. It is the tablet mode. You get a compromised phone and a compromised Windows.

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