HP Elite x2 1012 G1 Tablet - V1M31PA product reviews

HP have always been seen as a "business brand" more than a "consumer brand" and so, it's expected their hardware is going to be more about robust than style... so to see a stylish business-oriented hybrid unit come out of the box was a very pleasant surprise. This is a unit any businessman will be happy to slide out of the suitcase or shoulder bag and be seen using, as it is equally appropriate for both on and off duty use.

Fully fronted by gorilla glass, the wide bezel gives the tablet plenty of grab-space without risking fingers getting in the way of the screen. This makes the unit look a little clunky in 'notebook mode' however function wins out over form on this score as the unit is more tablet-oriented, despite the keyboard having some I/O ports of its own.

In "tablet mode" the unit can easily stand on it's own - something not common on tablets - through the use of a neat U-shaped 'foot' that runs around the edge of the lower half. This pivots out from the back plate, and has a high-friction hinge that allows it to stay put without collapsing, despite not having any visible locking mechanism. The upside of this is that you can set the display angle to almost anything you want within reason, to the limit of the foot's extension, without having to fiddle with it or worry about it sliding loose and collapsing when you touch it. There's no real downside, once you get over you natural worry that the slightest touch will mean your tablet skittering off across the table and falling flat.

The keyboard and trackpad are built right into the x2's keyboard/cover. Made of thin but stiff aluminium it also has a felt covered exterior. Along with these two inputs, you get a Wacom pen, it's a touchscreen and if you make use of the Cortana feature you can also count your voice as a control input. On top of that, HP have even managed to include something usually only found on laptops and high-end smartphones - a fingerprint sensor! This is on the back of the screen/tablet and is easily found by touch alone.

The keyboard is thin, but not suffering for that at all. The keys all have good travel so you know when you have pressed one, and HP somehow managed to shoehorn in lighting to give you a backlit keyboard. This is great if you are working in low lighting conditions. The keys are well-sized, especially for such a small chink of flatspace to fit everything into, and since this is a business machine you'll also find that using a function key, you get a remapping of part of the keyboard into a numberpad! Ideal for the number-crunchers who are trying to complete the quarterly spreadsheet while on the bus or train.

Speaking of which, using this on your lap can be a little bit of a hassle, as the magnetic catch system has flaws - namely the set of magnets that clip the kayboard cover to the front-bottom bezel of the tablet. The magnets that do the heavy lifting do fine, but this set create a secondary attachment point that causes the keyboard to become a hinge as well... and it gives way if you type firmly near the top row of keys. This makes for some tight-sphincter moments as the tablet makes a dive forward. Not entirely sure WHY it always seems to dive forward, but I'm grateful, because it means that the tablet snaps shut on your fingers, rather than making a bee-line for the nearest floor.

The trackpad is a bit of a gnome - short and wide, but it goes deep. Vertical scrolling suffers unless you mess with the settings and ramp up the scroll sensitivity. The trackpad is quite sensitive though, so you won't find the space as limiting as you may think at first. Give it time, you'll get used to it.

Unlike a lot of tablets out there - which tend to be touch or pen, rarely both - this does. Not just any pen/stylus though, this is a Wacom pen, so you know it's the best. That said, keeping the stylus with the tablet is awkward, annoying and ultimately frustrating. Your options are "give it a leash" with tough, thin string, or use stick-on loops that... well... they didn't. At least, not very well. If you look at Wacom art tablets, they have sturdy fabric loops hard-fixed to the case of the tablet. I would have loved to have seen this level of smarts brought to the task here, or the designers really going outside the box and coming up with a way to internalise the stylus somehow. Still... it's a good touchscreen, a very good touchscreen if I am to be frank about it, so I basically ignored the pen after about half an hour.

When it comes to the admittedly personal side of tablet use - watching movies on the go - this unit didn't really shine. With a fairly-run-of-the-mill (by today's standards) resolution of 1920 x 1280 (~2.4MP), it's certainly got a good pixel count for a portable device... however my smartphone has a resolution matching this. For a tablet of this size, I would expect something more in line with it's price-peers ranging around 5MP or even higher for some units. Add to that it's glossy screen - which is a style element that appeals a lot to the business market - and you get a screen that's good... but nothing great. Better resolution and a low-glare coating would be far more productive and practical, in my mind.

Overall, I only have 2 gripes about this unit - one big, one not so much. The small gripe is a very subjective one - I hate Windows 8 and am not fan of it's newer sibling, Win10. This tablet comes with an operating system I think is just too cheesy and stunted for it's own good. This hardware, running Android, would have tweaked my interest considerably more than this pairing. That said, the biggest gripe I have, and it's a kicker in this market, is that the battery life is quite poor. I didn't make it through a full day before I had to slap it back on the charger... however in fairness, I was really thrashing this little beast to see how far I could push it for the review. In day-to-day usage, it should be OK... but I have seen similar devices with better battery life under similar workloads, so there's definitely something amiss here. For a work-time-only tablet with the convenience and comfort of a surprisingly good keyboard, a good screen, and a tolerable lifespan, there certainly are worse units out there you could get caught by - this is good, just not great.