Move over, Alexa: More Cortana devices and skills are on the way

Harman Kardon isn’t the only company making a Cortana device.

Smart speakers are everywhere. Amazon now offers – count them – five different Alexa-powered speakers, while Google has the Assistant-powered Google Home, and even Apple is expected to launch its own Siri-powered smart speaker at WWDC 2017 next month. Microsoft and Harman Kardon also recently introduced Invoke, the first Cortana-powered speaker. But it looks like Microsoft isn’t stopping there.

In an effort to trump Amazon and other rivals, the company announced while at its Build 2017 developer conference that it has signed partnerships with HP and Intel to bring more Cortana-powered devices to market. Microsoft explained that HP is planning to integrate Cortana into devices, while Intel will focus on reference platforms. Either way, expect Microsoft’s assistant to become much more ubiquitous.

Keep in mind this follows the news that Microsoft launched a Cortana Skills Kit in public preview. The company basically gave developers the ability to create skills – or even port existing Amazon Alexa skills – over to Microsoft’s platform. This should drastically improve Cortana and make any upcoming Cortana hardware more useful. Let’s also not forget Microsoft’s recently leaked HomeHub feature.

• Microsoft unveils the Surface Laptop, a Windows 10 S device
• Microsoft will now release major Windows 10 updates twice a year
• Windows 10 S is a streamlined version of Windows for education

Microsoft appears to be planning a smart home control feature, or at least the first stages of it, which will become part of Windows 10, possibly in the next update due in September. HomeHub is being designed and developed to become the central control hub for families, and of course, being a Microsoft system, you will be able to control everything with your voice via Cortana.

Microsoft Build 2017: All the announcements that matter

The biggest tech companies hold annual developer conferences, and Microsoft’s has just kicked off.

Every year Microsoft spends a few days trying to bring developers and software engineers into its fold with a developer conference called Build. While at the conference, the company typically also announces updates for its services and platforms – whether that be Windows 10, Office 365, or the Azure cloud computing platform. Here all the major updates Microsoft announced at Build 2017.

• Microsoft unveils the Surface Laptop, a Windows 10 S device
• Microsoft will now release major Windows 10 updates twice a year
• Windows 10 S is a streamlined version of Windows for education

What is Build 2017?

Build is Microsoft’s annual developer conference. This year’s conference – known as Build 2017 – started off a little different. The company used its main keynote to focus entirely on developers. In past years, it was all about consumer technology and updates to consumer products like Windows 10 and Surface devices. Microsoft likely got all that out of the way with its education event earlier this month.

So, discussions during the Build 2017 main keynote primarily ranged from Microsoft’s artificial intelligence efforts to talk about its growing Windows 10 user base. Thrilling stuff, right? 

Can you watch Build 2017 online?

You can livestream Microsoft’s entire conference from the Build 2017 site.

What was announced at Build 2017?

Windows 10 users

Microsoft announced that Windows 10 is now running on 500 million “monthly active devices.” That metric includes not only Windows 10 installed on PCs, tablets, and phones, but also on Xbox One consoles, HoloLens, and Surface Hub devices. Remember, though: at the Build 2015, Windows boss Terry Myerson claimed Windows 10 would be installed on one billion devices within three years (so by summer 2018).

One year later, however, after Microsoft sold its Nokia subsidiary, Myerson admitted that getting to one billion Windows 10 devices would take longer. And by judging by this announcement, we’re guessing it still won’t meet that original 2018 deadline. Still, Windows 10 did get a boost in adoption – likely due to the year-long free upgrade offer that began with the operating system’s launch in July 2015.

ZDNet noted the 500-million milestone is the first numbers-related announcement in more than seven months, and that Windows 10’s growth pace has slowed significantly in the last couple years, though historical comparisons of such milestones are difficult.

Office 365 and Microsoft Graph

Speaking of usage numbers, Microsoft also announced that commercial Office 365 is running on 100 million monthly active devices, whereas as of October last year, there were 85 million commercial users, meaning 15 million have since then. While talking about Office 365, Microsoft mentioned it is adding new functionality to Microsoft Graph, an API that gives developers access to tools and data from Office 365 services.

Microsoft Graph is the basis of many applications built on top of Office’s services. It helps those apps understand more about the data we have in our systems. Previously, Graph could only provide user and activity data, but now, developers can leverage device data as well. Microsoft has also added a series of new core capabilities into Graph, including Delta queries and ‘custom data’.

New Insights APIs are coming too. They’ll be available in preview form and will allow developers to collect more data, for instance, on the most widely shared documents on OneDrive.

Developers can leverage Microsoft Graph to create systems of intelligence that fundamentally change the future & culture of work. #MSBuild pic.twitter.com/IopvjF7qza

— Windows Developer (@windowsdev) May 10, 2017

More Cortana devices and skills

• Move over, Alexa: More Cortana devices and skills are on the way

In an effort to trump rivals, Microsoft announced it has signed partnerships with HP and Intel to bring more Cortana-powered devices to market. Microsoft explained that HP is planning to integrate Cortana into devices, while Intel will focus on reference platforms. Either way, expect Microsoft’s assistant to become much more ubiquitous. Microsoft also launched a Cortana Skills Kit in public preview.

The company basically gave developers the ability to create skills – or even port existing Amazon Alexa skills – over to Microsoft’s platform. This should drastically improve Cortana and make any upcoming Cortana hardware more useful. Microsoft revealed Cortana is being used across 141 million monthly active devices. While discussing Cortana, the company said it wants to bring artificial intelligence to all its products. That includes Xbox, Windows, Bing, and Office.

Ready for Cortana? 140 million monthly Cortana users are ready for you. #MSBuild pic.twitter.com/xO7WLD3MhK

— Windows Developer (@windowsdev) May 10, 2017

Visual Studio

Microsoft has launched its Visual Studio coding platform for the Mac.

It allows developers to code apps using Microsoft’s development environment on Apple’s MacOS platform. They can sync across both Windows and Mac devices and build native mobile apps for iOS, macOS, Android, and the web. Microsoft said it enables MacOS and iOS developers “to use Microsoft’s development tools, since they will no longer need a Windows computer or virtual machine to do so.”

There are actually three different versions of Visual Studio for Mac available at launch: Visual Studio Community, Visual Studio Professional, and Visual Studio Enterprise. All three have been designed natively for macOS, and developers can manage their code hosted by any provider, including GitHub and Visual Studio Team Services. As for programming languages, the C# and F# languages are supported.

Just announced @ #MSBuild. #VisualStudio for #Mac. Build apps for mobile, web, & cloud w/ #dotNET & games w/ #Unity. https://t.co/lDDccK9IBO pic.twitter.com/l3sLXLGeDC

— Visual Studio (@VisualStudio) May 10, 2017

Want to know more?

Stay tuned to Pocket-lint’s Microsoft hub for what’s next at Build 2017. Microsoft also has some information avaialble about its Build 2017 announcements on its news hub.

‘Pro Evolution Soccer 17’ is coming to your phone this month

The eternal struggle between fans of EA’s fast-paced, good-looking FIFA series and Konami’s deeper, more realistic Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) video game titles rages across console and mobile versions. If you’re a fan of the latter, you’ll be happy to hear that Konami will bring Pro Evolution Soccer 2017 to iOS and Android later this month after a soft launch in Australia last December.

The new mobile, free-to-play football title will feature officially licensed teams, players and stadiums, including club and national teams as well as a UEFA Champions League license. Konami says that the game, while optimized for mobile, was made with the console title’s graphics engine, which could make for a slick, highly-realistic soccer experience on the go.

Soccer is a global phenomenon, and PES 2017 honors that tradition with an interface localized in 10 different languages and play-by-play commentary in nine: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese. Plus? For a limited time, pre-registering will net you some “deluxe” players to add to your team roster as you take on all comers.

This isn’t Konami’s first foray into the mobile soccer arena, of course. There have been many PES games on mobile since 2010, as well as a more strategic football manager app for the league. FIFA has been on mobile for a similar amount of time.

Source: Konami

New York joins the growing list of self-driving car testbeds

The Empire State and its bustling metropolis are ready to get in on the autonomous vehicle party. According to an announcement from Governor Andrew Cuomo, the New York Department of Motor Vehicles is now taking applications from companies that wish to test self-driving tech on the state’s public roads.

New York joins California, Nevada and Arizona (not to mention the city of Portland) in welcoming driverless cars to its roads, but state authorities will be regulating the vehicles fairly strictly. The test period, which was approved last month as part of the state budget, is currently set to expire in less than a year on April 1st, 2018. Aside from meeting the usual set of DMV inspections and safety standards, companies like Waymo, Uber and GM will also need to cover each autonomous vehicle with a $5 million insurance policy, keep a driver behind the wheel at all times and reimburse state police for costs associated with overseeing the tests. As an extra level of precaution, the vehicles will also be barred from navigating near school and construction zones.

“The State Police applaud any new and advanced technology that will improve safety on our roadways and reduce accidents, injuries and fatalities,” New York State Police Superintendent George P. Beach II said in a statement. “Any new technology, no matter how innovative, needs to be tested and evaluated appropriately and the State Police will perform its due diligence to oversee this process and ensure its effectiveness.”

Before the end of the test period, companies will also be required to submit a report on their test findings to the state’s Commissioner of Motor Vehicles. Given the relatively short timeframe, autonomous vehicle makers won’t have a whole lot of time to gather data in the state, but New York does present a variety of traffic conditions not seen in other test sites — specifically harsher winters and extremely dense urban environments that you just don’t get in San Francisco or Phoenix.

Via: Verge

Source: New York State Governor’s Office

Tesla’s stylish new solar roof expects to cost less than a traditional roof

Anyone who has had to replace a roof can attest that it is no small expense. Well, homeowners may have a better solution on the horizon that not only costs less upfront, but also saves them money over time, according to Bloomberg. Late last year, Tesla acquired SolarCity, with about 85 percent of shareholders voting to go through with the deal that made them the undisputed kings of sun-to-vehicle energy.

Shortly after the deal was finalized, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced the company’s new solar roofing would cost less to create and install than traditional roofing materials. He claimed all this savings would come before the savings on your electric bill. According to Musk, “Electricity is just a bonus.”

While the initial amount consumers could save by switching to a solar roof was unclear, Musk said customers who purchased a roof would save “considerable” amounts of money over a traditional roof. But just how much does that mean? We’re finally starting to find out. 

Beginning Wednesday, you can start pre-ordering your solar roof. To do so, you’ll need to put down a $1,000 deposit, though you can get a full refund should you decide against it before you sign the final contract. As for the final price, Tesla Solar has created a cost calculator (powered by Google’s Project Sunroof) that will give you a ballpark estimate specific to your needs. Simply enter your address, and you’ll get an estimate unique to your home, complete with the value of energy your roof will generate, the cost of the roof, the cost of the Powerwall battery (or batteries, if your home needs more), and the amount of the tax credit. You can also make adjustments to your estimate, like specifying the exact roof square footage or the amount of your current monthly electric bill.

If you’re happy with what you see, you can continue down the ordering pipeline by placing an order and awaiting a response from an engineer, who will pay you an on-site visit and determine precisely what your roof needs. Not all the tiles in your new roof have to be solar tiles because not all parts of your roof will get the same amount of sun).

Tesla’s high-end roofing materials include mimicked fancy terracotta and slate roofing tiles, which are made of textured glass. There are four designs to choose from, with styles to match every home. The tiles gather and store the energy from light for you to use in your home or electric vehicle. It’s estimated that the glass solar panels will be available for installation this year, while other slate panels won’t be around until 2018, or according to Musk, in “about 6 months.”

Article originally published in November 2016. Updated on 05-102-17 by Lulu Chang: Added news of pricing calculator availability for Tesla solar roof cost estimates. 

Asus ZenFone 3 Zoom’s high-end cameras are fueled by a beastly battery

Why it matters to you

The Asus ZenFone Zoom 2 was a stunner of a midrange smartphone. Asus will follow it up with the ZenFone Zoom 3, a smartphone with a top-of-the-line camera, massive battery, and shooting modes out the wazoo.

The Asus ZenFone Zoom 2 was a stunner of a midrange smartphone. It featured 3x optical zoom, great low-light camera performance, and an excellent battery life to boot. The latest addition to the Taipei, Taiwan-based company’s Zoom series continues in the original’s tradition. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, Asus took the wraps off the ZenFone 3 Zoom, a smartphone with a top-of-the-line camera, massive battery, and shooting modes out the wazoo. Unfortunately, it’s now being delayed until the second quarter of 2017.

Impressive cameras

The ZenFone 3 Zoom, true to its namesake, features a dual-camera system capable of high degrees of optical zoom. It comprises a 12-megapixel camera with a f/1.7 aperture, a 25mm wide-angle lens, and a secondary 12-megapixel, 56mm camera that handles macro shots as close as 3.94 inches. The rig’s capable of up to 2.3x optical zoom, Asus says, and offers a new shooting mode called Portrait that is similar to the iPhone 7s’s “bokeh” mode: backgrounds of photos are softly blurred as subjects are brought to the fore.

A manual shooting mode exposes most of ZenFone’s toggles to intrepid photographers. Settings like white balance, exposure values, focus, ISO, and shutter speed are adjustable. And a Full Manual mode allows the user to override the phone’s automatic camera selection and chose from either the 25mm, f/1.7 lens of the main camera or the 56mm lens of the zoom camera.

Autofocus is drastically improved on the ZenFone 3 Zoom too, thanks to a new solution that Asus calls TriTech+. Two phase-detection sensors on the ZenFone 3 Zoom’s camera pixels analyze the variations in light rays hitting the sensors and, in tandem with the other 12 million pixels on the ZenFone 3 Zoom’s sensor, focus continuously on subjects. The trifecta’s final bit, a second-generation laser focus technology with three times the range of comparable implementations on the market, helps the ZenFone 3 Zoom achieve a focus time of just 0.03 seconds.

The ZenFone 3 Zoom’s other photographic innovation is what Asus calls the SuperPixel, a technology that increases light sensitivity “dramatically” compared to the average smartphone. A 1.4-micron pixel size augments the camera’s dim-environment performance and reduces graininess, and a Sony IMX362 image sensor lets in more light.

The ZenFone 3 Zoom’s other camera touches are no less impressive. Four-axis optical image stabilization and three-axis electronic image stabilization minimizes shake and blur. A color-correction sensor automatically adjusts the photo pallets to look “natural” and “accurate.” And the phones’s front camera, not to be outdone by the dual-camera tech, sports a 13-megapixel lens and “screenflash,” a mode that uses the ZenFone’s display as a flash.

Finally, the ZenFone 3 Zoom’s shooters feature three new modes: Super Resolution, 3MP Enhanced Low Light, and HDR. Super Resolution stitches four 12-megapixel photos to create a single image. Low Light mode combines four adjacent pixels to work as a single pixel that shoots better in low-light conditions and prevents blurring. And HDR mode layers an overexposed image atop an underexposed image to enhance details.

Hardware and Specs

The ZenFone 3 Zoom’s innovations don’t end with high-tech cameras. The handset boasts a sandblasted aluminum-alloy body that measures 0.31-inches thin and 0.37 lbs in weight, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 processor and 5.5-inch Full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) display shielded by Corning’s Gorilla Glass 5. It also features 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, and runs Android 7.0 Nougat.

If there’s an undisputed hardware highlight, though, it’s the ZenFone 3 Zoom’s battery. The 5,000mAh cell has “one of the highest capacities of any smartphone,” Asus contends, and the largest in a smartphone of the Zoom’s thinness and lightness. And it features a unique reverse-charging capability that automatically juices plugged-in devices.

Pricing and Availability

After an initial delay (the handset was supposed to be made available in February 2017), the ZenFone 3 Zoom has been made available. It starts at $329 (about $80 less than the initial projected price of $400), and you can grab the handset from major U.S. retailers including Best Buy and Amazon, and of course, the Asus website.

Updated on 02-24-2017 by Lulu Chang: Added news of ZenFone 3 Zoom’s release date and price. 

Microsoft’s day one Build keynote focuses on Cortana, Visual Studio, and intelligent cloud

Why it matters to you

This is the Microsoft technology that is most likely to make your devices smarter and better connected than ever before.

Microsoft wrapped up its first keynote address of Build 2017, and it was a long one. Spanning almost three full hours, the keynote touched on all of the major points highlighting how developers can build solutions around Microsoft products and services.

Some of the topics covered were detailed, highly technical, and of interest exclusively to developers. Some topics, however, did have more universal appeal, and here’s a roundup of what Microsoft covered that will have the greatest impact on the typical PC user.

Cortana

Microsoft is in a race against Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Apple Siri when it comes to personal digital and home assistants. The company has made its Cortana Skills Kit available in preview, meaning that developers can start building skills into Cortana to make her more useful to a wider range of users. So far, out of 300 million people using Windows 10 on roughly 500 million devices, only 145 million are actually using Cortana — and that’s a number that Microsoft needs to improve if it wants to compete in this increasingly important space.

The company also spent some time on new Cortana-powered hardware. Not only was the Harman Kardon Invoke speaker highlighted throughout the event, but Microsoft also announced additional partnerships with HP and Intel on Cortana-powered devices to come.

One of the keynote’s more impressive demonstrations was given by senior product manager Laura Jones, who showed off some Cortana Skills that moved from the home to the car to the office. Cortana was able to recognize the context and respond appropriately, including providing a solid hands-off experience that should make driving while working a little less dangerous.

Read more

Visual Studio 2017 – Now available for the Mac

Microsoft’s most important developer toolset, Visual Studio 2017, was released for Windows in March 2017. As such, it was a central focus of the first keynote address and was featured in numerous demonstrations. Clearly, Microsoft sees Visual Studio 2017 as central to its commitment to helping developers create powerful — and lucrative — solutions around Microsoft’s most important products and services.

The most important announcement was likely the availability of Visual Studio 2017 for the Mac. Now, there’s one seamless development environment that can span the most important platforms. The new Mac version is just as feature-complete and powerful as its Windows counterpart, meaning that developers can now build apps on their Macs that utilize C#, F#, .Net Core, Asp.Net Core, Xamarin, and Unity. Even better, a developer who buys a license to one platform automatically receives a license for the other as well.

Read more

Cognitive services and the new Presentation Translator

Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and bots are some of the most important technologies — and buzzwords — in the industry today. Everyone is investing heavily in making our machines smarter, and Microsoft is no exception. It should come as no surprise, then, that the company spent some serious time on outlining how all of its products and services make use of the Microsoft Bot Framework and Cognitive Services suite.

The Microsoft Bot Framework has been expanded, adding in “Adaptive Cards” that are available across apps and platforms. Skype for Business, Bing, and Cortana are just a few of the channels that can be leveraged, and more than 130,000 developers have signed on to use the technology.

A real-world application of Microsoft’s machine intelligence functionality was demonstrated in the new Presentation Translator. This new Office 365 feature uses Microsoft AI to translate in presentation captions between multiple languages in real-time. Anyone who’s attending a meeting can click on a link that will provide translated captions via the new AI-powered Presentation Generator.

Read more

Azure intelligent cloud

Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform is one of its fastest-growing businesses, and it’s a vital component of the company’s “cloud-first, mobile-first” productivity solutions strategy. As such, it received a fair amount of attention during the first keynote address. The company focused largely on explaining how Azure can interact with Internet of Things (IoT) devices to create a cloud that extends intelligence all the way to the cloud’s edge.

One demonstration showed how Swedish company Sandvik uses Azure and edge IoT devices to provide unparalleled insight into how well its various industrial devices are functioning. The demonstration showed just how powerful the combination of massive computing power, IoT devices, and powerful logic can be in allowing organizations to manage large numbers of remote devices.

Read more

AI for workplace safety

The second half of the keynote focused on Microsoft’s vision for artificial intelligence. Sataya Nadella once again took the stage, discussing broad concepts about how man will work with machines, not against them. Cortana, remote presence via Hololens, social bots, and Skype translate were listed as various examples of how Microsoft is making that vision a reality.

A demo showed how AI can be combined with mundane tools like video cameras to see and react to the world in remarkable ways. The specific context of the demonstration was improving workplace safety, by combining Azure Stack, Azure Functions, Cognitive Services, and cameras, to achieve 27 million image recognitions per second.

In the context of workplace safety, the system was impressive. Adding new employees was easy, given that the system was constantly photographing people who were detected on-site. An administrator needed only to select and identify a person and then fill out additional details.

Read more

Scientists predict AI will allow us to translate dolphin language by 2021

Why it matters to you

Using AI to translate dolphin chatter shows just how quickly natural language processing tech is advancing, and how many languages it can be applied to.

AI-driven natural language processing is getting better and better at understanding languages spoken in every country around the world. It doesn’t have to stop at land-based languages, however — as Swedish-based language startup Gavagai AB is keen to prove.

Working with researchers from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Gavagai AB is currently involved in a four-year project, designed to gather as much “dolphin language data” as possible, and to use this to decode the chatter of everyone’s favorite aquatic mammals.

In theory, learning what a dolphin is saying is no different to understanding other languages. Research has suggested that dolphins communicate in a language not entirely dissimilar to our own, relying on sentences composed of individual words in which the order dictates meaning. They even pause to let one another speak. Decoding this conversation relies on the same ability to draw links between sounds and meaning as would be the case with any other language — only with what one imagines includes a higher propensity to talk about tasty types of fish.

Such a system could even conceivably be used to reverse-engineer software allowing humans to communicate with dolphins by translating messages into the appropriate lines of Flipper chat. How far this will get by 2021, when the project ends, remains to be seen, but this promises to be of interest to both AI practitioners and zoologists alike.

Gavagai AB CEO Lars Hamberg stressed to Digital Trends that there are no obvious commercial applications for dolphin translation, although it’s certainly interesting to think of possible use-cases. The U.S. Navy, for instance, has previously used military dolphins for tasks including rescuing lost swimmers and locating underwater mines. This training could presumably be made easier, and other tasks added, if a more direct line of communication between man and dolphin is made possible.

But Hamberg stressed that understanding dolphins is far from the only thing Gavagai AB is working on. Right now, he is in Silicon Valley speaking with investors about raising additional capital to continue developing the Gavagai AB technology.

“The dolphin research has gone haywire in terms of publicity, but the truth is that it’s one of many, many projects that we’re doing,” Hamberg told us. “Over the last seven years, we’ve spent about $9 million working on implementing this research into an industrial scale implementation that can understand 45 different languages. On a lot of benchmark measures, we outperform all of our rivals. We’re now gaining a lot of interest, having toiled away under the radar for a long time.”

In other words, click click whistle click whistle. (That’s dolphin speak for “keep watching this space.”)

Robot eye surgeon is 10x more precise than the most steady-handed human

Why it matters to you

Robotic eye surgery sounds terrifying, but this robot is a whole lot more precise than even the most skilled of human surgeons.

From clumsy machines that couldn’t navigate down a hallway in a straight line, robots sure have come a long way in the past several decades.

So why not reward them by teaching them a new, slightly more complex task — like carrying out an operation inside the human eye?

That’s exactly what a hospital in the United Kingdom did in a recent trial, in which robots competed against human surgeons to carry out a delicate surgery involving membrane-removal on the retina. A group of 12 patients was divided into two groups, with half undergoing the traditional human surgeon-led procedure and the other half undergoing the operation as carried out by robot.

“This is the first time robot-assisted surgery has been performed in the eye,” Marco Bellini, research coordinator of the Medical Sciences Division of Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, which carried out the project, told Digital Trends. “The robotic device is able to perform surgical procedures through the conventional surgical portholes used for retinal ‘keyhole’ surgery.”

The robotic surgical device itself was built by Preceyes, a Dutch engineering company. The advantage of the remotely-controlled robot is that it is able to more accurately perform extremely delicate operations, which even prove challenging for a trained surgeon to do by hand. The robot itself only has up/down, left/right, and toward the head/toward the feet directions, but within these parameters can operate with incredible accuracy; making movements as precise as 1 micron. In the eye, the robot operates through a single hole in the lens less than 1 millimeter in diameter, which it enters and exits several times during the procedure. The robot is controlled using a joystick and touchscreen by the human surgeon.

The combination of human and robot means carrying out the task with approximately 10x more precision than a human surgeon operating on their own. In the study, the patients in the robot group experienced significantly fewer hemorrhages, and less damage to the retina.

“Based on feedback from this pilot study, the Preceyes team is currently optimizing the prototype in order to increase its versatility and reliability,” Bellini said. “Once the device has been tested in more surgical procedures and is ready for market, an application will be made for a CE mark.” (Read: the mandatory marking found for certain products within the European Economic Area, similar to the FCC mark used on particular electronic devices in the United States.)

HP EliteBook X360 G2 review

Research Center:
HP EliteBook X360 G2

Intel’s Ultrabook initiative and Microsoft’s Surface have raised people’s expectations of what qualifies as an acceptable high-end Windows 10 PC. Nowhere is this truer than with business-class notebooks, where employees expect the same qualities in employer-provided machines as they do in the consumer devices they would buy for themselves.

Simply put, it’s no longer acceptable for a company to buy cheap, bulky notebooks to distribute to employees. Rather, today’s workers appreciate thin and elegant designs, quality displays, and other features just as much as anyone else. At least, that’s HP’s position — and judging by its most recent business-oriented 2-in-1, the EliteBook x360 G2, the company is taking it seriously.

Of course, the combination of quality and business chops make for an expensive machine. We looked at an EliteBook x360 G2 equipped with a seventh-generation Intel Core i7-7600U CPU with Intel vPro technology, 16GB of DDR-2133MHz RAM, and a 512GB NVMe SSD, for $1,979. Has HP managed to produce a premium business machine that’s worth its premium pricing?

Built both beautiful and robust

HP has incorporated just enough similarity between its high-end machines to maintain the brand, but included just enough differentiation to please different target markets. The EliteBook x360 G2 is no different.

The machine has the same diamond-chiseled lines found in the company’s Spectre machines, and many of the same general design cues. Nevertheless, it retains its own understated professional look, with a silver chassis that offers an attractive mix of class, elegance, and business demeanor.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

Build quality is excellent, as is the case with many Windows 10 PCs lately. The chassis is constructed from machined aluminum, the 360-degree hinge is smooth and reliable throughout its entire range, and the machine feels supremely solid. It’s clearly in the same class as the best-built notebooks being produced today.

The EliteBook x360 G2 is in the same class as the best-built notebooks produced today.

Proving that beauty isn’t only skin deep, HP also designed the EliteBook 360 G2 to pass the MIL-STD-810G suite of tests for things like drop, vibration, and temperature resistance. That doesn’t mean that HP is selling the machine for use in military duty, exactly. Rather, it means that HP took pains to ensure that the machine will stand up to any abuse that business professionals are likely to dish out.

That’s not to say the EliteBook 360 G2’s design is perfect. HP missed out a bit on thermal management, specifically in terms of how hot air is vented. The input vent is on the bottom and towards the front, which isn’t that unusual, but it does mean that the machine needs some clearance to make sure sufficient air can be sucked in.

However, the exhaust vent is more problematic. It lines the rear edge underneath the display, and points downward. The machine was never more than very warm during testing, and fan noise was at a minimum. Nevertheless, what heat the EliteBook x360 G2 does produce is exhausted down onto a user’s legs when used in a lap, which made things a bit uncomfortable.

Just enough connectivity

For such a thin machine, at just 0.59 inches thick, the EliteBook x360 G2 has a decent selection of ports. There’s a USB Type-A connection for legacy support, a 3.5mm headset jack, and a smart card reader along the left side. The right side offers up a second USB Type-A connection for even better legacy support, a full-size HDMI port, a USB Type-C with Thunderbolt 3 for future support, and a microSD card reader. A Kensington lock slot is also provided for anyone who wants to keep the machine secure, another business-oriented bonus.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

Interestingly, HP went with an old-school power adapter rather than adding a second USB Type-C port, which was a disappointment, but might make IT departments happy if they have compatible AC adapters in their inventories. We plugged in a USB Type-C adapter from another machine and it charged the EliteBook, although a warning popped up recommending an HP power supply.

Wireless connectivity is provided by Intel dual-band 8265 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2. WWAN connectivity is also an option, though it wasn’t provided on our review unit. A near-field communications (NFC) chip was included in our configuration, and located to the upper right of the touchpad.

A plethora of input options

HP’s designers paid serious attention to the keyboard, and it shows. The EliteBook x360’s Premium Collaboration Keyboard is indeed excellent, maintaining the theme of strong attention to detail that pervades the machine’s overall design. The keys are a bit shallow at 1.3mm, which is slightly less than the 1.5mm travel we usually prefer. However, HP uses a mechanism that activates at just the right amount of force. It’s crisp, without any hint of bottoming out.

We thought the keyboard on HP’s Spectre x360 15 one of the best available, but this one beats it by a country mile. Not only do the keys feel great individually, but HP also took pains to make sure that keystroke is uniform throughout the entire keyboard. The keyboard is also quiet, and even spill-resistant.

We don’t usually gush over a keyboard, but HP knocked this one out of the park.

We don’t usually gush over a keyboard, but HP has knocked this one out of the park. If you type thousands of words a day, then you should consider the EliteBook x360 G2 for its keyboard alone.

The touchpad felt equally excellent. It’s large enough to be comfortable, fits well into the available space, and has a smooth glass surface that provides just the right amount of friction. In addition, the physical buttons have a nice click, but aren’t unnecessarily loud. HP used an Alps touchpad, and in an interesting twist built in two modes, Windows Precision Touchpad mode, which works just as well as all touchpads supporting that protocol,

In another nod to flexibility, Microsoft supports Windows Hello via infrared camera, and facial recognition via a built-in fingerprint scanner. Both work reliably, so it’s a matter of user or organization preference. For companies that are still using the older smart card technology, HP has built in that security option as well.

HP EliteBook X360 G2 Compared To

Dell Latitude 13 7370

Asus Zenbook UX305UA

Lenovo ThinkPad P50 20EN-001RUS

Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon (3rd Gen)

Lenovo Z40

Acer TravelMate TMP645-MG-9419

Lenovo ThinkPad T440s

Toshiba Tecra Z40

Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E431

Lenovo ThinkPad T431s

HP EliteBook 8560p

Toshiba Satellite M300-S1002X

Lenovo ThinkPad T60p

Gateway NX570

Lenovo 3000 V100

As a Windows 10 2-in-1, the EliteBook x360 G2 has a 10-point multitouch touchscreen that’s just as responsive as expected. HP also bundles its Active Pen, which provides 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity, and full support for Windows 10 Ink. It worked as well as any other active pen we’ve tried lately.

A strong but not exceptional 1080p display

Our review unit was equipped with a Full HD (1,920 x 1,080) display that was just sharp enough given its 13.3-inch 16:9 dimensions. A 4K UHD option is available. HP also offers a unique SureView privacy screen technology, which can be turned on or off with a button. We saw it at CES, but it was not on our review unit.

According to our colorimeter, the EliteBook x360 G2’s screen is good, but not great. Contrast came in at 790:1, which is well below our comparison group and particularly poor compared to the Surface Book and MacBook Pro 13 with Touch Bar. AdobeRGB color gamut was also below average, whereas sRGB color gamut was a bit stronger. Color accuracy was 1.66, where anything less than 1.0 is excellent, and gamma was 2.3, a little off the 2.2 standard. Finally, brightness was a real weakness, at 251 nits.

HP will be offering other displays with the EliteBook x360 G2, including a 4K UHD option. It’s been a pattern lately that manufacturers offer better high-resoluton screens, so that might be the case with the EliteBook as well.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

In use, our review unit’s screen was fine for general productivity work, but its glossy coating was a distraction, and it had to be cranked up to 100 percent brightness in some scenarios. In a dark room the display looked strong, with vibrant color and reasonable contrast. It’s no match for Apple’s MacBook Pro or Microsoft’s Surface line, however.

Simple speakers that get down to business

The EliteBook x360 G2 benefits from HP’s partnership with Bang & Olufsen, much like its consumer-oriented siblings. In this case, there are two speakers with HP Audio Boost. Subsequently, sound quality is very good for music and movies in each of the machine’s four modes.

Of course, this is a business-oriented machine that’s optimized for communications. Accordingly, Bang & Olufsen has focused on making sure that voice quality was above par, and HP has implemented its Noise Cancellation technology, to make sure that everyone in a teleconference can hear everyone else. We felt the call quality was indeed good, but we were not able to test it under every possible meeting scenario. User beware – Skyping from the airport still isn’t the best idea.

Solid productivity performance

The HP EliteBook x360 G2 that we reviewed was equipped with a seventh-generation Intel Core i7-7600U, which should put it at the top in terms of performance for dual-core notebooks. And indeed, the HP performed as well as expected. It also stayed remarkably cool with very quiet fans, though as mentioned earlier, the downward-facing venting is unfortunate.

In terms of objective benchmarks, the EliteBook x360 G2 performed as expected on the popular Geekbench 4 tests. It beat out each our comparison machines, including the similarly equipped Lenovo Yoga X1 Carbon, and it was significantly faster than 13.3-inch notebooks with Intel Core i7-7500U processors.

The EliteBook x360 G2 also performed as expected in our more taxing Handbrake test that converts a 420MB file to H.265. Its score of 1,109 seconds was just behind the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, and ahead of the machines with slightly slower CPUs.

In the end, the Core i7-7600U, which is the fastest Intel dual-core processor available, gave the EliteBook x360 G2 superior performance.

A speedy SSD, but not the fastest around

HP is offering several storage options with the EliteBook x360 G2, including a choice between SATA and NVMe M.2 SSDs. Our review unit was equipped with a fast Toshiba NVMe M.2 SSD that was quick, but not quite at the top of the performance heap.

The EliteBook x360 G2 was a bit slower than some other similarly equipped machines, scoring 1,118 megabytes per second in the CrystalDiskMark read test. The 942MB/s write score was much more competitive. However, HP opted not to use today’s fastest M.2 drive, the Samsung’s SM961, that Lenovo used in its ThinkPad X1 Carbon, and that’s disappointing given the machine’s premium nature.

In real-world use, the EliteBook x360 G2’s results are still good, and the machine was plenty fast. No matter what you’re doing, you won’t find that accessing or saving files or applications unnecessarily slows things down.

Truly a business, not gaming, notebook

The EliteBook x360 G2 is a business laptop. Buying it to game would never make sense. Still, we like to be through, so we gave it a pass through a few of the games we normally test.

As you can tell from the 3DMark results, the EliteBooks x360 G2’s Intel HD 620 graphics perform exactly as expected. It’s competitive with the comparison systems, but that’s not saying much. If you’re looking to game on a notebook, then you don’t want to choose any laptop that uses Intel HD 620 integrated graphics.

The story is the same in real-world testing. We use Civilization VI, Battlefield 1, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and For Honor to test how modern games run on our review machines, and really, there’s no reason to even report any scores here. Suffice it to say, these games are essentially slideshows at 1080p resolution and medium detail.

You can play some Solitaire if you want to pass the time while working on spreadsheets, but you’d be better off playing most games on your smartphone than on the EliteBook x360 G2.

Portability

The EliteBook x360 G2 is a small and light machine, measuring 12.48 x 8.6 x 0.59 inches, and weighing in at 2.82 pounds. It’s easy to carry around, and feels solid while doing so. The machine packs in a 57 watt-hour battery, which promises at least decent battery life.

Our battery tests lived up to the machine’s promise. It didn’t last as long as HP estimated, which was 16.5 hours, but as always that’s an estimate that’s not based on real-world use. In our most aggressive Peacekeeper test, the EliteBook x360 G2 lasted six hours and 36 minutes. That’s a solid score, though it can’t keep up with the long-lasting Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

On our moderate macro looping test, that more closely mimics general web browsing and productivity use, the EliteBook x360 G2 lasted eight hours and 31 minutes. The Lenovo X1 Carbon and HP Spectre x360 both had better endurance in this test, but the HP’s score is nevertheless a solid result.

Finally, we ran our video loop test, which repeats a movie trailer playing from storage. Here, the  EliteBook x360 G2 lasted a more competitive 11 hours and 56 minutes. Again, that’s less than the Lenovo X1 Carbon, but longer than other comparison machines.

Overall, then, the EliteBook x360 G2 provides solid battery life that should last for a full workday before you need to plug back in. And when you do, you’ll benefit from HP’s quick charge technology, which we verified will charge the battery to 50 percent in just 30 minutes.

Loaded with software that’s a plus for business and IT professionals

HP loads this machine with a lot of software. Some is the usual mixture of casual games and Microsoft Windows 10 first-party apps like Mail & Calendar, Groove Music, and Music & TV. The rest are HP’s various support apps, which are generally useful, and its HP Orbit app, for connecting to a smartphone and transferring images, video, and notes.

Warranty information

The EliteBook x360 G2 is a part of HP’s business line, and as such comes with a strong three-year warranty. That’s an excellent benefit that anyone can appreciate. Most laptops have a one-year warranty, and upgrading it usually isn’t cheap.

Our Take

The HP EliteBook x360 G2 is a solid business-class notebook that offers compelling value for professional users and enterprise IT managers. It offers superior security and manageability to go along with an attractive design and robust build. The machine is a little expensive for its specifications, and doesn’t have the best display around.

Is there a better alternative?

There aren’t that many business-class Windows 10 2-in-1 machines to choose from that compete directly with the HP EliteBook x360 G2. Probably the most obvious alternative is the Lenovo X1 Carbon, which in its most recent iteration is an excellent business-class machine. It’s also $2,123 when equipped like our review EliteBook, which runs $1,979.

The DT Accessory Pack

HP Dock for USB-A/C Laptops

$199.99

HP Active Pen

$47.25

Anker USB-C Aluminum Portable Gigabit Ethernet Port

$22.99

The Lenovo had a faster SSD, a somewhat better display, and better battery life. However, it doesn’t offer nearly the same security and manageability of HP’s EliteBook x360 G2. Choosing between them will come down to your priorities.

You could also consider one of the excellent mainstream Windows 10 2-in-1 devices in the same size class, such as HP’s own Spectre x360 13, and Lenovo’s Yoga 910. Both of those are great machines, and you’ll spend a little less picking one up. These machines lack the business-focused software suite, however, and aren’t MIL-SPEC tested for durability.

How long will it last?

The EliteBook x360 G2 uses the most up-to-date components, including seventh-generation Intel Core processors and fast SSD storage. Connectivity options give a nod to legacy devices and IT department needs while looking forward with a USB Type-C connection. Given the 4K UHD display option, the machine can keep up with the latest developments in video, as well.

Should you buy it?

If you’re looking for a secure, manageable, and good-looking productivity workhorse, then the HP EliteBook x360 G2 is an excellent option. You’ll pay just a bit more than for a mainstream 13.3-inch 2-in-1 machine, but you’ll get more than enough value to justify the extra investment.