HP announces the Windows 10 Mobile powered HP Elite X3 ecosystem

At MWC 2016 in Barcelona this evening, HP has now officially announced its new HP Elite X3 family of devices and they’re just as impressive as the rumors indicated.

The new HP Elite X3 is the center piece of this family of devices, and it is an amazing one. If you thought of the Surface as a tablet that can become your laptop and the 950 as a phone that can become your desktop – then the HP Elite X3 is the powerful phone that can replace both your laptop and desktop.

Here is everything you need to know about the HP Elite X3:

• 5.96-inch display (2560 x 1440 pixels, AMOLED, anti-reflective coating, Gorilla Glass 4)
• 8MP rear camera (f/2.2 aperture), 5MP front camera (f/2.2 aperture)
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 (Quad core, clocked at 2.15 GHz)
• 64GB of internal storage (with microSD support up to 2TB)
• 4GB of RAM
• 4150mAh battery, QI and PMA wireless charging
• 7.8mm thick and weighs in at only 195g.
• Bluetooth 4.1
• GSM, WCDMA, LTE support
• Glance screens support
• HP Graphite (color)
• Available in the summer

Aside from the HP Elite X3, HP also brought its own Desk Dock, Mobile Extender (and a mobile printer as well). These devices allow you to extend your Windows Mobile device onto bigger and better screens. The Desk Dock is a small dock that allows you to connect your device to another display, keyboard, and mouse with continuum and HP Workspace. The dock is similar to Microsoft’s own display dock with the exception that it allows you to connect to wired Ethernet and it can be secured in face with an integrated security lock.

On the other hand, the HP Workspace is “an app catalog designed by HP to easily enable access to virtualized apps”. HP Workspace will basically allow the user to access company curated catalogs of x86 apps via a virtualized solution. HP states:

The HP Workspace on the Elite x3 creates a virtual PC, giving users access to company curated catalogs of x86 apps via a virtualized solution. Users benefit from quick access to their virtualized apps with a full keyboard and mouse experience not typically available from a mobile device when using the Desk Dock and Mobile Extender.

The Mobile Extender is perhaps the most ambitious of the lot, it is essentially a dumb premium laptop that allows you to cast your device either via Wifi or USB type C. The laptop itself is 12.5″ with a 1080p screen and a full sized keyboard and mouse. It is aluminum and billed as “ultra thin” and “ultra light” – an attractive device.

There’s also a mobile printer that HP is announcing as well. While it may seem mundane, if you’re using your phone for business, having a printer is one of those things you can’t take for granted.

What you should take from all these specs, is that this phone is a phone that both Windows fans and business users can be proud to pull out of their pocket. It is a top of the line device, with top of the line specs in every arena and there are no obvious gotchas as with the design of the 950 and 950 XL. It also represents the first time a non-Nokia Windows Mobile OEM is taking one of Microsoft’s concepts and building an entire ecosystem of devices around it, and that is quite refreshing after a period of stagnation.

We cannot judge the devices without having laid hands on them yet, but these devices have the potential to be revolutionary and bring Windows Mobile back in the game again.