Hewlett-Packard believes the future of laptops lies in “converged” devices like its new Pro X2 410, which is a tablet that comes bundled with a detachable keyboard.
The hybrid device, announced on Monday, has a 295mm (11.6”) screen that can be used as a tablet and gives more than 12 hours battery life with a keyboard attachment. The product runs Windows 8.1 and buyers can choose from range of Intel low-power Core Y-series processors based on the Haswell architecture.
It will be priced under $900 (€661) and there will be no option to buy just the tablet, which was designed with the keyboard attachment in mind, said Aaron Slessinger, notebook category manager at HP.
HP will sell the product as a “converged device,” Slessinger said, adding that HP considers it a PC first and a tablet second.
“It essentially gives you the same performance in slate mode as it does in keyboard mode,” he said.
HP will show the Pro X2 410 at the International CES trade show in Las Vegas. The company also offers the Split x2 detachable, which is targeted at consumers.
The Pro X2 410 weighs over 907 grams but its display, at 295mm inches on the diagonal, is larger than those of most regular tablets, which generally have 177mm to 254mm (7 to 10”) displays.
HP’s tablet has a 2-megapixel front camera and a back camera, and the screen shows images at a 1366 x 768-pixel resolution. The keyboard attachment has a battery pack and USB and HDMI ports.
The move by HP for a hybrid device follows the same design philosophy as the Surface Pro line from Microsoft. The Surface Pro II now available, which was reviewed on Techcentral.ie in November of last year, carefully balances processing power with battery life to give a desktop style experience when plugged into mains power, but functions as a fully featured tablet when on the move. Similar devices are also available from other manufacturers, such as Toshiba’s Z10t hybrid, which was reviewed here in November also.
These hybrid devices can be used on the desktop with docking stations and other accessories to give all the performance and capability of a traditional desktop replacement laptop, itself a much decried format when it was introduced some years ago, but also give full portability as a tablet without losing any capabilities.
HP also announced budget laptops with Intel’s Core, Pentium and Celeron processors based on the Haswell architecture. The HP 350 G1 family will include 356mm and 396mm (14″ and 15.6″) models, and users can select graphics processors from Advanced Micro Devices. The HP 210 is a netbook-style laptop with a 295mm screen, with an option to buy a touchscreen model. Prices and shipping dates for the laptops were not available.
techworld.com and TechCentral Reporters
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