HP Elite x3 Windows 10 Mobile $799 Bundle Ships September 12th With Plenty Of Caveats
If you’ve been itchin' to get your hands on Hewlett-Packard’s flagship Elite x3 Windows 10 Mobile smartphone, the wait is going to be just a bit longer — two weeks longer in fact. HP originally stated that the smartphone would ship on August 29th, however, the company is now revising that date to September 12th.
This is according to a new listing via the Microsoft Store, which is only offering the Elite x3 with the bundled Desk Dock. This brings the total price of the bundle to $799 (the phone costs $699 without the dock direct from HP). Like Microsoft’s Display Dock for the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL, the Desk Dock transforms the Elite x3 into a quasi-desktop with mouse, keyboard, and monitor support.
However, if you look at the laundry list of notes at the bottom of the listing, there are plenty of caveats if you’re an early adopter of the Elite x3. For starters, that rear-mounted fingerprint reader isn’t even supported in software yet. It will be enabled in a future Windows 10 Mobile update according to Microsoft.
While HP has said all along that the Elite x3 has IP67 dust- and water resistance compliance, actual testing to verify this capability has yet to be completed (perhaps that explains the shipping delay). In addition, the MIL STD 810G rating is also pending.
And here’s another big one — the Elite x3 is a GSM-only smartphone, meaning that it’s incompatible with Verizon or Sprint networks.
If all of that doesn’t turn you off, there’s still plenty to like about the Elite x3 given its beefy specs, which we’ll rattle off here:
- 5.96-inch WQHD AMOLED display
- Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor
- 4GB RAM
- 64GB internal storage
- microSD slot that supports up to 2TB
- 16MP main camera, 8MP front camera, Iris camera
- 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, LTE-A, NFC
- 4150 mAh battery with Quick Charge 3.0 support
- USB-C
With that being said, Hewlett-Packard is entering the Windows 10 Mobile market at a time when Microsoft’s smartphone platform is on life support. As we reported earlier this morning, Windows Phone/Windows 10 Mobile has just a 0.6 percent share of the global smartphone market.
