HP ENVY x2 Pro Reviews

I personally use a keyboard connected to my iPad at all times as I enjoy the tablet, but also enjoy the feel of a real keyboard at the same time. The HP Envy X2 is geared to someone like me who likes to go back and forth between a laptop setting to a tablet setting at any time. I found if you think of the HP Envy X2 as the best of both worlds, that it’s done very well and certainly stands out in my opinion due to its great battery life and display. The HP Envy X2 also gives a premium feeling to it with its brushed-aluminum exterior and when it’s paired with its keyboard dock, no one would think twice if that was a tablet docked into a keyboard. They would just think it’s a laptop, which means the look HP was probably going for the HP Envy X2 was a success. If you find its keyboard and trackpad are comfortable by possibly having a feel down at the local Best Buy or any other major retailer showcasing the HP Envy X2, and its low performance is something you can live with, then we certainly recommend you give the HP Envy X2 a try if you’ve been wanting a true Windows 8 tablet that offers the familiarity of a laptop.

The Envy x2 is a looker, and a more than workable Windows 8 tablet. It's also eminently viable as a light-use laptop PC. All in all, a nice job, and yes, I was just a tad envious when I had to turn it back in.

We love the X2's design, but it's rather expensive given the modest performance on offer. Even so, it can still handle most basic computing tasks perfectly well, and its ingenious convertible design and impressive battery life mean that it will continue to earn its keep long after most laptops have run flat.

A stylish Windows 8 hybrid device with great battery life – but the price is too high

The HP Envy x2 is a product that we were excited about when it was first announced. But that excitement has largely evaporated thanks to the product's price point. See, the HP Envy x2 isn't a bad product by any means, it's just badly positioned on the price ladder. On the positive side the x2 combines a decent build with great battery life and a bright, wide-viewing-angle screen. Its future-thinking features such as NFC are also a bonus. But such positives can't counter the near-£800 price and limited performance from the Atom processor. That's the long and short of it: the HP Envy x2 is a smart little hybrid, but there are cheaper and more powerful competitors out there and that's what holds this model back.

If you ignore the $850 price tag, the HP Envy X2 makes sense as a sort of cross between a Windows RT tablet and an ultrabook. It’s a thin and light laptop that also functions as a tablet with long battery life. But it’s hard to ignore that price tag. Basically if you plan to use the computer as a notebook, you’re paying 3 times the price of a netbook to get netbook-style performance (plus a touchscreen and extra-long battery life). If you plan to use the X2 primarily as a tablet, you’re stuck with an operating system that has a well thought-out user interface, but not as many high quality apps as other platforms. You can also pick up an iPad or Android tablet for less than half the price of the X2.

HP came so close with the x2. It built an attractive, versatile convertible laptop at a relatively affordable price — $849.99 as I tested it — that I genuinely enjoyed using. But there are a few issues and omissions, none a deal-breaker on their own, that add up to more of a compromise than I'd like to be forced to make. With no backlit keyboard and no USB 3.0 port, and effectively no ability to run more demanding apps, it's hard to recommend the x2 to anyone as their primary machine. If it had a Core i5 or i7 processor inside, I'd recommend the x2 without a second thought, but as it is it's like the converse of the Lenovo ThinkPad Twist I reviewed a couple of weeks ago: where Lenovo's laptop is powerful but finicky and at times unpleasant to use, the x2 is pretty and usable, but it just can't do some things it should be able to handle. On some level, the x2 is almost like a Chromebook, or what we always hoped the netbook would be. It would be a perfect second machine or travel device thanks to its fantastic battery life and small size — and Windows 8 is a much more powerful operating system than Chrome OS, even when it's being limited by the Clover Trail processor. But that $850 price tag becomes a lot harder to stomach when a Chromebook is $650 cheaper, even if the x2 does have much better hardware and works well as a tablet. If you're in the market for a second machine, whether you want to watch movies or get some work done, the x2 is a great option, but if you're looking to buy your one and only laptop you should probably settle down with something more capable.

The single most important caveat with the HP ENVY x2 is that its specification is extremely lean: as tested, the device achieves only average benchmark performance and is fitted with just 2GB of RAM and 64GB of storage (with up to 24GB of this being partitioned for system recovery). From a pure Ultrabook perspective, this seems very limited indeed. But viewed as a tablet computer - powered with a dual-core 1.8GHz Intel Atom processor and boosted by a high-quality detachable keyboard with trackpad and connectivity ports, not to mention double battery packs... oh, and it runs Windows 8 - the ENVY x2 is extraordinary.

The HP Envy X2 (11-g012nr) is a slick-looking detachable tablet laptop with all-day battery life, but some may balk at price and the limitations of an Atom processor.

Windows 8 is the beginning of a dream in which tablets and computers seamlessly merge. Whether that dream has a happy ending or not remains to be seen, but the HP Envy x2 is one of the products that give me a lot of hope that this is all heading in the right direction. HP's combination 11-inch laptop and detachable full Windows 8 tablet isn't a wholly unique idea, but it's one of the best-designed iterations of the "hybrid" detachable concept in the Windows 8 launch generation. That might not be saying all that much, since the detachable-tablet laptop-hybrid landscape is currently largely populated by a bunch of underpowered, overpriced machines running next-gen iterations of the Intel Atom processor: better than Netbooks of old, but a long way from the speed and power of any ultrabook. If your fantasy always involved taking an 11-inch ultraportable like the HP dm1z and giving it the option of a detachable tablet screen in an attractive, comfortable laptoplike form, this is that product. If it weren't over $800, I'd be a lot more bullish about it. Even so, this is a somewhat sexy, if limited, device. Consider, too, that other very similar products like the Acer W510 cost less, an 11-inch touch-screen (but non-tablet) Asus VivoBook X202E with a Core i3 is $549, and more powerful Intel Core-based tablets like the Microsoft Surface Pro are around the corner (and don't cost that much more). Also, the processor and hardware landscape is bound to keep advancing quickly in a way that'll make this Atom-powered machine feel out-of-date sooner rather than later.

Like so many convergence devices before it, the HP Envy x2 sets out to deliver a good experience as both a tablet and a laptop, and it compromises slightly on each. On the tablet front, the hardware and design deliver, but as yet, there just aren't that many great touch-centric Windows 8 apps. That will doubtless improve with time, but with Google and Facebook both taking a wait-and-see approach before developing for Windows 8, it may be several months or more before the Win 8 tablet experience catches up with the likes of iOS and Android. Once that happens, the x2 should deliver a decent portable experience. Things are a bit more problematic when considering the Envy x2 as a full-fledged laptop. The x2 has under 40GB of usable storage (without inserting a comparatively slow expansion card), 2GB of RAM, and an Atom processor that's speedy in tablet mode, but extremely slow compared to even Core i3 laptop processors.