Back in September, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 5G, its latest SoC for PCs. It's a pretty minor refresh of the first-gen chipset, and Qualcomm said that that was because it was trying to shorten its time between announcement and availability. At the time, there was a teaser for a business PC from HP that would use the new platform, and now it's here with the Elite Folio.
You might recall that a couple of years ago, HP had the Spectre Folio. This is the same form factor, but without the leather cover and swapping out the Intel Y-series processor for a faster ARM-based chipset. Instead, the Elite Folio has a magnesium unibody, a much lighter material than the heavy leather and aluminum that the Spectre Folio was made out of. Still, it weighs in at 2.85 pounds.
The Elite Folio has a 13.5-inch 3:2 display with a 1920x1280 resolution, and an option for HP's Sure View Reflect privacy display. Naturally, it has pen support, with the pen being housed in a garage that's built into the keyboard. After all, the display folds out to be completely flat as a tablet if that's what you're going for. For battery life, HP is saying 24.5 hours.
Now for the bad news. One of the key value propositions behind Windows on ARM is that cellular connectivity comes standard; it's not an optional premium like it is with Intel PCs. Well, it's an optional premium when it comes to the HP Elite Folio. There are actually three options here. There's a Wi-Fi-only configuration, an option for a Snapdragon X20 4G LTE modem, and an option for a Snapdragon X55 5G modem.
It has other premium options too, such as up to 16GB LPDDR4x RAM and up to 512GB M.2 NVMe 2280 SSD storage. It also passes 19 MIL-STD-810H tests, and includes 90% recycled magnesium. As we've seen from the Elite Dragonfly as well, the speaker enclosures are made from ocean-bound plastics. It's part of HP's sustainable PC portfolio.
The HP Elite Folio is set to arrive this February, and the company will announce pricing as we get closer to then.
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