With that, HP has launched the Elite Wireless Earbuds that aim to enhance your productivity whether on the go or staying at home.

According to HP the earbuds will take two hours to fully charge, while 15 minutes will provide you 1.5 hours of use. Once fully charged, HP says the earbuds will grant you five hours of listening time or four hours of talk time. The case, meanwhile, also takes two hours to fully charge and can support three earbuds recharges on one charge itself. The case uses a standard USB-C to charge up.

The Earbuds also feature a 9.2mm neodymium drivers and a nominal frequency range of 20Hz to 18kHz, personalised audio tuning, adjustable noise cancellation, and sound situation pre-sets.

The new HP Elite Wireless Earbuds isn’t just for listening to music but also for clear video meetings. HP even has new Renew Travel bags for keeping all of these new gear safe when you’re on to go. The buds are expected to reach local retailers in April 2021 with a retail price of about R3000 (TBC).

The Elitebook x360 1030 G3 is a premium laptop that has consumer design queues and enterprise strengths. It is the world’s smallest business convertible with a starting weight of only 1.25kg (2.76 lbs.) and is 15.8 mm thin. With up to 18 hours of battery life and 4G Cat9 LTE for ultimate connectivity, this sleek device features the world’s first active pen with proximity alert for business PCs to notify a user when the pen is left behind and an optional, first of its kind, outdoor viewable display.  Out of the box the device comes equipped with:

• A Notebook
• Charger – 65W USB-C with smart power delivery
• HP Active Pen (this may not be in all packages)

First Impressions and Build Quality

The first thing you will notice when first laying your eyes on the device is just how good looking it is with a dash of premium and high-end qualities about it, this is also part thanks to its natural silver finishes. The product is also quite light at 1.25kg and as thin as they come at 15.8mm.

HP also smartly fitted a full-sized HDMI Port (ahem…Apple take note) and a USB Type-A. On the left side you will find one USB 3.1 port with always-on charging, a headphone jack, the power button and a Nano SIM card slot. On the opposite (right hand) side you will find an HDMI 1.4 port, a security lock slot, two Thunderbolt 3 ports and a volume rocker.

The device is solidly built with an enormous amount of attention to detail being evident throughout. Adding to the fun is a removable bottom base plate for 100% access to all the parts. You might be asking what that means exactly? This essentially means that an HP technician can come to either your house or workplace and fix anything faulty with the device with no need for you to take it in store should you not feel like it. Quite nifty right?

The sides of the laptop come equipped with a glossy finish, while the hinge is stylishly cut outward and has a very cool EliteBook logo in the middle. When we folded it into tablet mode, we interestingly noticed that the tip of the laptop has magnets that connect to the underside. This makes working in tablet mode feel more comfortable and stable.

The Screen

The screen resolution is amazing with equally crisp colours coming through. The device is a bit brighter than the MacBook Pro 13 and over twice the brightness of the Dell XPS 13. This is thanks to its 13.5, 1080p BrightView screen and 415 nits (518 nits with Sure View panel).

Webcam & Sound

The Elitebook x360 1030 G3 also comes equipped with a 720p front camera which is decent enough for the basics such as Skype and the like. The camera is sharp and does show enough quality and detail.

As you know we are huge fans of music, movies and TV shows here. Therefore viewing quality and sound output is very important to us. We found the EliteBook x360’s Bang & Olufsen speakers complete with a cross-hatch speaker grill in front of the screen (that houses two speakers powered by separate left and right amplifiers) to be a winner delivering great sound quality. The same was also the case for the sound quality when using the Bluetooth 4.2 and the 3.5mm audio output to the headphones/speakers which came out at a clean 20-20kHz.

Overall Impressions

The HP Elitebook x360 1030 G3 is a great device for both business and personal use. Being an avid fan of great design and aesthetics, we were especially impressed with its rugged good looks that come complete with a thin and light feel to them…this device just drips in utter swag. Of course it does offer so much more but we chose to only focus on what matters to us the most and in that instance it more than came out tops. For those looking for something unique and unlike anything most people currently own at the moment, the HP Elitebook x360 1030 G3 is a no-brainer.

At a Recommended Retail Price of R31,999 (VAT included) it’s not exactly cheap however, considering what it offers and what you are getting in return then it’s understandable. The product is unfortunately not available in retail stores, it is instead available through HP’s entire commercial channel base. Feel free to view the device’s full specs here.

The device was launched an exclusively intimate event in the North of Johannesburg last night. First impressions are of extreme thinness. In fact, the 13.3-inch notebook is 10.4mm thick, comparable to an AAA battery no less, and tips the scales at about 1.1kg. 

The lid is a wafer, and the base seems little thicker once the screen is lifted. HP took inspiration from furniture for the Spectre’s hinges, two slender C-shapes that look like they should be delicate but actually glide smoothly open and shut.

Doing double-duty of keeping the weight down but also avoiding body flex are CNC machined aluminum for the lid and keyboard deck, and a carbon fiber base. HP continues to eschew the more traditionally-geek-friendly silver highlights for coper and ash-silver instead – the rear section is both particularly shiny and hungry for fingerprints – which may well prove divisive. It looks better in-person, I think.

There’s also a new logo, a heavily stylized “HP” on the lid. Previous Spectre series notebooks spelled out the whole Hewlett Packard name, you might recall, but the computing division lost the rights to that in the split late last year. HP tells me it’ll be keeping this new logo exclusively for its more premium models.

The dimensions mean most regular ports simply won’t fit in the space HP has to play with, and so – with the exception of a 3.5mm headphone jack – the new Spectre embraces USB-C completely. There are three USB-C ports each with USB 3.0 support, and two of which also support Thunderbolt.

The specifications are as you’d expect, for the most part, though the design has forced a few compromises. Rather than a low-power processor, Intel’s regular sixth-gen Core i5 and Core i7 chips are inside, along with 8GB of memory and up to 512GB of PCIe SSD storage.

However, there’s no touch support – the touchscreen layer would add too much thickness, HP says – and the IPS screen is Full HD resolution, not Ultra HD. A sufficiently thin 4K panel still isn’t available, HP tells me, though it does throw in Gorilla Glass 4.

The backlit keyboard keys have 1.3mm travel – rather than 1.5mm – though in my brief typing test I didn’t particularly notice any slowdown in my pace. HP claims that’s because it pays particular attention to the resistance you feel when you first strike each key and when it bottoms out.

Underneath is a glass trackpad, while either side – behind somewhat ornately-milled grills – are Bang & Olufsen tuned speakers. Unsurprisingly they’re notably lacking in bass.

It’s not a machine for everyone. Those with a bag full of accessories they want to keep using will likely find the need for USB-C adapters too frustrating, while pixel-addicts or those who like to navigate with their fingers are both out of luck with the Spectre’s non-touch, FHD screen.

Still, priced from R29 999 as it goes up for sale, it’s quite clearly taking on Apple’s MacBook Pro with Retina display and doing so competitively. Style-starved Windows fans take note.