Source : Internet
HP Elite x3 Review
THE BOTTOM LINE
The HP Elite x3 is an unusual business-focused phone that could really pay off for imaginative IT departments.
PROS
- Big, clear screen.
- Easily IT managed.
- Integrates well with Microsoft Cloud and Salesforce.
- Turns into a desktop or laptop with Continuum.
CONS
- Not as well supported by third parties as Android or iOS device.
- Continuum only works with a limited subset of apps.
- Main camera experienced focus problems in testing.
It may be all work and no play, but the $699 HP Elite x3 is far from dull. It's the flagship Windows 10 Mobile device for the year, and it's potentially a mobile worker's dream when supported by the right line-of-business apps. In the hands of the right IT department, it can be a clean, secure mobility solution that replaces corporate-liable phones, tablets, and thin-client terminals with one set of devices. The phone isn't going to appeal to individuals, though, as it lacks many apps and experiences average users want.
Physical Features
The Elite x3 ($0.00 at Amazon) is a very large phone. It measures 6.26 by 3.29 by 0.31 inches (HWD) and weighs a hefty 6.84 ounces. It has a striking 6-inch, 2,560-by-1,440 screen. Below the screen, there's a chrome bottom bezel with a stylized speaker grille highlighted by a small Bang & Olufsen logo. An 8-megapixel camera, which includes an iris scanner for Windows Hello facial recognition, sits above the screen.
The phone is water (3 feet for 30 minutes) and drop resistant, rated military spec 810G. It's not indestructible, but it'll take a tumble. I'd still get a display protector, as the Gorilla Glass 4 screen protrudes slightly from the body.
SIMILAR PRODUCTS
The body is primarily plastic, and it's rounded, smooth, and warm. On the side, a dual SIM slot can take two SIMs or a SIM and a microSD card to supplement the 58.2GB of available storage. On the back there's a 16-megapixel camera and a round fingerprint scanner. You can also use an iris scanner, on the front, to authenticate yourself. The phone has a single USB-C port on the bottom and a headphone jack on top. The beefy 4,150mAh battery isn't removable.
Performance and Call Quality
The phone supports LTE bands 1/2/3/4/5/7/12/17/29/30, so it will work well on AT&T, T-Mobile, or foreign networks. It's Category 6 LTE, so it won't get the highest speeds T-Mobile is implementing through 3x carrier aggregation, or the signal strength benefits of 4x4 MIMO, but those features are still relatively rare.
The Elite x3 is a dual-SIM phone. It gets data on one SIM at a time, and you can switch which one in settings; the other SIM is for voice and text only, and it has a separate text mailbox and icon from the first SIM. The idea is to allow for folks who want a business and personal number on their phone, although as I explain below, you probably don't want to use this as your personal phone.
Call quality varies. Signal strength is as good as you'd expect from a phone this big, with antennas commensurate to its size. Calls sound loud and clear in the earpiece. The mic, on the other hand, could be better. My voice came through on outgoing calls, but so did some noticeable background noise. The speakerphone is surprisingly rich and deep, but calls made through it from a noisy area sounded like they were from the bottom of a well. On an indoor call, the transmission sounded a bit better, but there was still definitely some annoying, noticeable echo. I'm not sure if the built-in mic is all that relevant, though. This giant phone is almost too big to hold in your hand, so you'll probably be making a lot of your calls through a wired or Bluetooth headset.
Inside, there's also a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor similar to the one in the Samsung Galaxy S7 ($219.99 at Amazon) , and 4GB of RAM. We don't have a good set of Windows Mobile platform benchmarks, as there are too few Windows Mobile devices to compare. But we did run JetStream and Basemark Web, which are Web-based benchmarks, to compare the Elite x3's browser performance with other top smartphones.
The results were inconsistent. The Edge browser couldn't properly complete the Basemark Web benchmark in three tries, finally spitting out a low result of 58.15, which is comparable with an inexpensive, midrange Android phone—not with a leading smartphone. The JetStream score of 60.7, on the other hand, is better than any Android phone we've tested.
Wi-Fi performance is also perplexing. The dual-band, 802.11ac Wi-fi had no trouble connecting to our 5GHz network, and range was slightly longer than the Galaxy S7. In poor signal conditions, the Galaxy S7 and the Elite x3 got similar speeds. But close to a fast router, the Elite x3 would only show 100Mbps down when the Galaxy S7 would show 150Mbps or higher. That may be an artifact of the Speedtest.net app, once again showing the difficulty in comparing devices across platforms.
The proof is, ultimately, in using the device. Especially in Continuum, Web pages show in full desktop mode, although complex pages have some delays in scrolling. There's no Flash or Java, so if your Web applications rely on those, you're out of luck. But I was able to enter data into our Web-based content management system, which I'm not able to do on other phones.
The phone got quite warm while recording 4K video and running benchmarks. It wasn't painful, but it was definitely noticeable.
Battery life is amazing. I ran our battery test, which continuously streams a video over LTE, and got an impressive 9 hours, 58 minutes. But that doesn't show the full strength of the 4,150mAh cell: the phone lasted an entire weekend of light to medium use. To recharge, it supports Qualcomm's QuickCharge 3.0, although the power adapter it comes with isn't quite that fast. A Qi wireless charging case is available as an optional accessory.
Continuum and HP Workspace
If you buy the x3 alone, you might be doing it wrong. The phone's differentiator is Continuum, its ability to transform into a desktop or laptop PC, and, with the appropriate thin-client software, run even legacy line-of-business apps.
A $799 bundle includes the x3 and its critical Desk Dock, a heavy chromed lump that turns the x3 into a desktop PC. The x3 stands up in the Desk Dock and gets a full-sized Ethernet port, a full-sized DisplayPort, two USB 3.0 ports, and a USB-C port. DisplayPort isn't my choice for presentations, but HP is offering an HDMI dongle as an accessory.
A $1,299 bundle gets you an x3 and the HP Lap Dock. It's a 12.5-inch, 2.4-pound laptop shell the x3 attaches to using Wi-Fi or a USB-C cable.
I'm typing this review on Continuum right now. It's not a full PC, it's more like a thin client. You only get one window at a time (although you can flip between apps easily), and it's best to think of only Microsoft Office, the Edge browser, and virtualization apps like Citrix, VMWare, and HP's own HP Workspace as compatible.
The Office apps aren't fully featured versions, though, so I suspect virtualization is going to be a key element of x3 deployment. HP Workspace is a SMB solution that lets you rent a virtual machine by the hour, but of course virtualization clients scale up. The sample HP Workspace account I got with my x3 included Internet Explorer 11, making the point that this may be the only mobile device that can let you into some older, gnarly browser-dependent or .NET-based custom solutions. An IT department can install any other Win32 app in there, though.
Workspace feels fast. There was a tiny bit of lag, but I was able to create charts in Excel, edit a PowerPoint presentation, and save them both to my OneDrive account without much of a bother. Yes, there are virtual desktop solutions for other platforms, but the X3's dock really makes the device feel like a desktop PC.
In Continuum mode, the x3's own screen remains completely functional as a secondary display. That let me pull off a trick I'd never done before on a mobile device. I joined a Skype for Business call, read a PDF on the smaller display, and took notes in OneNote on the larger display with my full desktop keyboard.
As mentioned above, this is the only phone I've ever been able to access PCMag's content management system on. But since less prominent third-party apps generally don't support Continuum, I ended up with a two-screen workflow. For instance, I'd edit a photo on the small screen in the dock, then paste it into an article using the Continuum browser.
I'm still swimming through some bugs, though. When Continuum launched last year with the Lumia 950 ($0.00 at Amazon) , it was very buggy. A year later, it's still not bulletproof. As I was taking notes in OneNote, the mouse pointer became inaccurate. My ability to use my mouse also went away when I left the phone alone long enough for the screen to turn off; reconnecting it to the dock fixed that.
Windows 10 Mobile
We have a full review of Windows 10 Mobile, so be sure to take a look. The most important OS features for the x3 are the enterprise ones.
Windows 10 Mobile shines in Windows-centric enterprises. All of the security and cloud services are automatically plumbed in, with OneDrive acting as invisible connective tissue between them. Third-party enterprise clouds are also pretty well represented; Salesforce is preloaded, there's a Dropbox client, and more. Slack works on the handheld but not in Continuum mode.
If you use Google services at all, though, stay away. Support for Google varies from buggy to kludgy. It doesn't mark Gmail messages as read correctly, it lacks enterprise Google calendar features, and there are no native clients for any of Google's document services.
Enjoy the alphabet soup of supported IT acronyms here. Windows 10 Mobile plugs easily into Active Directory, offers simple MDM, lots of VPN solutions, segregation of personal and corporate data, conditional access, guarded app installations, and other ways to prevent good people from accidentally doing bad things (or from letting bad people do bad things).
Security is a big strong point here. I know, I know, you're laughing, it's Windows. But Windows Mobile is a much smaller attack surface than the big mobile OSes, and the management tools really help IT departments keep an eye on how phones are performing and behaving.
Sounds great, right? It is great, as long as the app you need is supported. In an IT-controlled context, IT can ensure that. But the full range of apps from major brands that you may expect on other platforms still isn't available on Windows Mobile, and may never be. For instance, Amazon Music, American Airlines, Lyft, Citymapper, Google Docs, Jira, Snapchat, and TD Bank, to use major players in very disparate categories, are all missing from the platform. With a solid enterprise deployment, you can virtualize missing business-critical apps through HP Workspace or your favorite virtualization platform. But consumers will still find too many dead ends and closed doors when they try to turn to brands they'd expect to be on a modern mobile platform.
Camera and Multimedia
The Elite X3 has a 16-megapixel main camera that records 4K video, and an 8-megapixel front-facing camera that records 1080p. Unfortunately, the main camera has a major software flaw: it takes much too long to focus, and lets you shoot pictures and videos before it has locked on. That means several of our test shots were fatally out of focus, and the chance to capture moving subjects was lost. One of my attempts to take video in low light never focused at all.
Even in focus, we weren't too impressed with the main camera's performance. Moving objects in both indoor and outdoor shots tended to blur. That makes the camera great for capturing whiteboards, boarding passes, houses for sale, and other things that basically don't move, but not for taking pictures of kids.
The front-facing camera, which is probably going to be doing a lot of Skype video calling, performs better. Test videos were smooth and sharp at 30 frames per second even in low light. Low light increases noise, but this will be a fine video chat companion.
Microsoft's Groove Music is the default player here. It gives you unlimited music for $10 per month, or you can play your own files from OneDrive or synced from a Windows PC. The platform also has Spotify and Pandora, but not Amazon Music, Apple Music, or Google Play.
There's an interesting quirk to the headphone amp. Music sounds better through lightweight earbuds I got for free at a trade show than through my high-end Bowers & Wilkins P7 headphones , perhaps because the headphone amp doesn't have enough juice to drive the big cans. Music sounded a bit flat and dull in the P7s, but punchy and rich in the earbuds.
The front-facing speaker on the bottom gets much louder for music playback than it does in speakerphone mode; it filled the small room I was in without a problem.
Videos look great on the big, high-resolution screen. I wish there was a native HDMI port on the phone, but you can get a USB-C to VGA adapter for $19, or a USB-C to HDMI or DisplayPort adapter for $29 to show presentations on the go. I couldn't find the setting for wireless Miracast screen sharing, although it's supported by the phone's hardware.
Comparisons and Conclusions
The HP Elite x3 looks like a great solution for enterprises that want to consolidate their hardware layouts, are willing to buy into the full Microsoft stack (Office 365, Skype for Business, SharePoint, domains) and don't allow BYOD. If employees want to play Pokémon Go, they can do it on their own phones.
Hospitals, for instance, are studded with older terminals running proprietary software, and switching those out for x3s running virtualization software in docks could allow for a move to a more flexible, more secure doctor-centric device model rather than a location-centric model. The New York Police Department has standardized on Windows Phones for their security and manageability. Delta Airlines has shown how Windows devices can be deployed to great effect in an airline context. HP also wants to make a big pitch for sales organizations, where PowerPoint is a big deal. I can see this device picking up some of the customers in regulated industries that BlackBerry has dropped.
Notice that I'm not evaluating this phone for individuals. There's no sign that HP intends to sell the Elite x3 to consumers, and the lack of US carrier retail support and of popular apps make this OS a weak third place choice for everyday buyers. People looking for a large smartphone should check out the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge ($792.00 at Verizon) or the Apple iPhone 7 Plus ($769.99 at Verizon) , both of which have broad third-party support.
That's why the Elite x3 gets my recommendation, but not a very high rating—our rating system doesn't really account for niche enterprise phones like this. If you're in IT, though, take a hard look at the Elite x3 for your crew.
The HP Elite x3 is an unusual business-focused phone that could really pay off for imaginative IT departments.
Like What You're Reading?
Sign up for Fully Mobilized newsletter to get our top mobile tech stories delivered right to your inbox.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
No comments:
Post a Comment