The HP Envy X2 is a Windows 8 tablet with an 11.6 inch display, an Intel Atom Z2760 Clover Trail processor, and a detachable keyboard base that extends the tablet’s battery life and adds extra ports.
HP introduced the tablet in August, but the company hadn’t set pricing yet. Now HP has announced that the HP Envy X2 will launch November 14th for $849.99 and up.
Update:Â Let’s make that December…
That makes the Envy X2 one of the most expensive Intel Atom powered computers I’ve seen. To be fair, the tablet is pretty well specced, with 2GB of RAM, a 64GB SSD, an 8MP rear camera, HD camera on the front, WiFi, Bluetooth, and NFC.
But you don’t get some premium features we’ve seen on other tablets such as support for a digital pen or a 1080p display. The Envy X2 has a 1366 x 768 pixel screen.
There’s a microSD card slot in the tablet portion of the computer, and the keyboard dock has 2 USB ports and an HDMI port.
One of the things setting the HP Envy X2 apart from many of the Windows 8 tablets we’ve seen recently is that HP will only sell the tablet and keyboard together. So the $850 starting price includes the keyboard.
The tablet alone weighs about 1.6 pounds. That jumps to 3.1 pounds when you add the keyboard dock, which is still pretty light for a laptop. And when the screen is docked, the X2 really does feel like a laptop.
HP uses a magnetic lock to hold the tablet in place when it’s docked, and you can even turn the computer upside down without worrying about the screen falling out.
Samsung offers a tablet with similar features — including an optional keyboard dock. But the Samsung Ativ 500T tablet has a starting price of $650 for the tablet alone, or $750 with a keyboard dock (which has no battery).
Or you can pick up an Asus VivoTab 11.6 inch tablet with an active digitizer and digital pen for $799 — but the optional keyboard dock costs extra.
So yeah, looking at the competition, I can see why HP thinks the Envy X2 is worth $850. But not offering a cheaper option (with less storage, or no keyboard) seems like a risky move.
Update: HP will also offer an optional stylus for writing and drawing on the Envy X2.
Pretty sure this supports an active digitizer, they’ve mentioned it in the past, but haven’t specified which one.
I think you might be mixing this up with the HP ElitePad 900 business tablet .
This was from one of their press releases on the X2
“The HP ENVY x2 also features Beats Audio for the best-sounding, richest audio experience available on a PC. An optional stylus offers added creativity, giving customers the freedom to write, draw and navigate with added accuracy.”
https://www8.hp.com/us/en/ad/envy-x2/features.html
Shows a stylus, looks like N-Trig? Can’t really tell but doesn’t appear to have an eraser.
Huh. That might be new. I don’t remember seeing it this summer. Thanks for the heads up!
That’s what I’m here for! It also shows at the top of the page that it’ll be available December, which is a bummer as I was hoping to pick one up this week.
I don’t suppose you could reach out to HP to see what technology they are using for the digitizer could you?
These glorified netbooks, if attractive and sexy, are simply ripoffs.
OEMs seem to have succeded in making us believe that the new standard for hybrids are tablet prices (instead of netbooks/notebooks with a detachable keyboard).
$750 up to $950 (the Asus) for a netbook with a detachable IPS display. Fantastic!
Actually, even compared to Android tablets, these prices are ludicrous.
$650 or $800 for a 1366*768 res, this is ridiculous.
Yes, you get a combination hardware/OS OS which gives 70% productivity (there still are Atoms inside), but, boy, you gotta pay for it.
That’s about $250 for W8 (implementation) for the tablet ALONE!
And, for that price you don’t even get an USB 3.0 port. Because with that liliputian storage, you’ll sure be needing an external hard drive (add $100 to the price). Shameful.
A netbook with detachable keyboard and touchscreen (with 64GB SSD) should be $600 at max (and I’m being generous).
Acer isn’t far from these prices (but for the 32GB models) but their keyboard are pityful.
/Rant.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Windows 8!
Or “Welcome to the I-try-to-make-Apple-Margins world”.
The coming of touchscreen ready W8 helps a lot of course, but this trend started with tablets and ultrabooks.
The prices are reasonable when compared to tablets actually… Considering it has 64GB of storage, 11.6″ display, IPS, Keyboard with Internal Battery, and an active digitizer for pen input, the prices aren’t so bad.
How much does a 64gb iPad cost? was it $699?
That’s my point.
The new standard for notebooks are (‘high end ‘) tablets prices because with W8, everything will be touchscreen/convertible/detachable. Hence the switch to tablets MARGIN.
They didn’t kill the netbook, it’s very much alive… But at high end ultraportable prices.
You don’t see anything wrong with this picture?
If not, it’s because you are buying into the overpriced tablet hype (I own one, I know…).
How much a 32/64 GB low/midrange ssd nowadays?
More than a 320GB HDD from 3 years ago? I don’t think so.
Same goes for IPS display, above all at this res.
We gotta wake up. Margins (therefore prices) are going through the roof.
OEMs started with tablets, then ultrabooks and now hybrids/convertible. Which will soon be ALL and ANY ‘laptops’.
Screen quality isn’t determined by only resolution, netbooks typically had low cost TN displays and not high quality IPS displays for example.
Tablets are used typically pretty close to the user and thus screen quality is more of a concern than they were for netbooks and laptops.
So multiple factors go into the screen quality.
The MS Surface for example reduces the glass thickness and reflection index for better clarity, along with other enhancements. So to the naked eye it may very well look just as good as a retina display.
High PPI alone doesn’t really mean much if the other aspects of the screen aren’t also high quality. For example, you can have retina resolution on a e-ink but you would never confuse it with a proper screen!
Netbooks also cut a lot of corners on other parts, HDDs are still much cheaper than SSDs, and squeezing everything behind the screen increases costs.
Never mind every one of these tablets are pretty much custom. Netbooks spent years making parts standardized and off the self to reduce costs, which tablet makers can’t yet do.
Along with the added costs of more premium parts is part of why tablets cost much more than more traditional PCs.
Though higher margins are also a factor but netbook were the exception to the rule as far as that goes and the rest of the market never really followed suite.
There are also different realities between mobile and traditional PC components. ARM tablets for example used integrated LPDDR2 RAM and eMMC (embedded Multi-Media Card) storage instead of the DDR3 SO-DIMMS and SSDs used in laptops.
This helps lower cost and power consumption but also lowers the kind of maximum performance you can expect.
However, increasing competition could mean we might start seeing better prices down the road, along with improved performance… So perhaps next year when the next gen hardware comes out and competition between ARM and x86 really kicks off…
1- Why would R&D for tablets cost more than R&D for netbooks 4 years ago. The miniaturisation challenge was the same and even more difficult since, today with the R&D made/applied for/to smartphones) you get everything there is in a tablet in a PHONE. Which, last time I checked is far smaller.
Also, that’s the third or fourth gen of tablets (dependin on the OEM). R&D has pretty much been amortized by now. RT or Windows tablets are very much the same than Android and iPad ones (hardware wise).
So, invalid argument.
2- Again 32GB (or even 64GB) SSDs price TODAY are marginally more expensive (if not cheaper) than 320GB HDDs from 3-4 years ago. Especially the low quality ones they put in their machine.
And when you see the time it takes to transfer files from/to your tablets to/from your computer you know that, in fact, therey are very low cost SSDs/Flash storage in these devices.
Maybe that’s why they don’t use USB 3.0 for these glorified netbooks, it would be useless and indicates clearly how cheap and slow their SSDs really are.
Invalid argument again.
3- low-midrange IPS display today, if of better quality (which is to be expected in a constantly improving industry, don’t you think?), are not that much more expensive that TN from 4 years ago.
4- So, you really think, these minors (if existing at all) increases in cot explain why retail prices went up by more than 100% (x2) or even 200% (x3) in Asus case?!
A netbook cost an average of $350 3-4 years ago, today’s touchscreen and hybrids netbooks (normal evolution) cost an average of $750.
1- No, the miniaturizing wasn’t the same. You’re comparing making a 7″-12.1″ mini laptops compared to making 10.1″ and smaller systems that have to be crammed behind the screen and still be thin and light enough to hold and use for long periods of time.
Essentially all parts have to occupy a very limited space with tablets, significantly more so than netbooks, and that’s harder to keep cool and design efficiently.
They’re also constantly changing designs… So work done on previous models don’t really help the newer models much.
While netbooks were standardized, very little distinguished one model from another, they heavily pushed it so pretty much everything used off the self parts.
Add netbook technology didn’t really advance much in 5 years.
While the simple fact is Tablets have always cost more than equivalent laptops.
2- No, SSDs are still considerably more than equivalent HDD pricing for capacity. SSD prices have improved over the last few years but you’d be paying about $1000 more for the same capacity SSD you get for a $100 HDD.
While you’re forgetting the cost of SSDs were higher back then too, which is again why they moved away from SSDs, like the 1st gen Netbooks had and switched to hard drives.
It used to be a 8GB SSD that was barely faster than a HDD would cost over a hundred by itself.
The move to HDD also standardized parts for them as they could use the same mass produced 2.5″ parts as regular laptops instead of proprietary SSD formats like Flash_Con.
Only now is more industry standard formats like mSATA are becoming dominant but the push for thinner and lighter still pushes proprietary solutions like what Apple came up with for their MacBook Air line.
Really, order anything made to order under custom specs and it will cost you a lot more than a mass produced standard part.
3- You’re ignoring the additional layers, gorilla glass and similar, digitizers for touch and pen (they’re separate except for N-Trig), and all have to be integrated to take up minimum space.
Screen technology, along with battery technology, are advanced much slower than the rest of the industry. So even 3-4 years ago means very little change.
4- Point is the pricing didn’t go up, tablets were always costly. We just don’t have netbooks to fall back on like we used to…
Even a year ago, a Windows 7 tablet like the Asus EP121 Slate or Samsung Series 7 Slate would cost you over a thousand, similar systems further back cost even more.
There are still tablet makers basing tablets on older ATOM solutions and they cost several hundred even during the height of the Netbook popularity.
Even Eee PC convertible models typically had pricing much higher than the regular netbook models.
So the main difference now is they’re pushing what used to be niche products into the mainstream. Some are just not used to how these products are priced but even Android tablets aren’t that cheap.
The only ones that are… are made by companies that don’t need to follow normal market rules because they don’t need to profit from the product but rather the services the product helps promote.
Amazon, Google, and B&N all make their profits from ads and services they provide. Amazon is on record stating they don’t make profit from the Kindle Fire!
While those smaller tablets are also cheaper to make. So anyone using them to compare to the rest of the market will get a unrealistic and very lopsided view.
It’s not all bad news though, prices are starting to go down. They may seem high but they’re lower than they were a few years ago and will continue to go down.
Going mainstream also means increasing competition and that will steadily start to erode the pricing as well.
Just don’t expect the change to happen overnight though…